Hongnan Lin (Georgia Institute of Technology , Atlanta, Georgia, United States)Liang He (University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States)Fangli Song (School of design, Atlanta, Georgia, United States)Yifan Li (Georgia Institute of Technology , Atlanta, Georgia, United States)Tingyu Cheng (Interactive Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, United States)Clement Zheng (National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore, Singapore)Wei Wang (Hunan University, Changsha, China)HyunJoo Oh (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States)
This paper presents FlexHaptics, a design method for creating custom haptic input interfaces. Our approach leverages planar compliant structures whose force-deformation relationship can be altered by adjusting the geometries. Embedded with such structures, a FlexHaptics module exerts a fine-tunable haptic effect (i.e., resistance, detent, or bounce) along a movement path (i.e., linear, rotary, or ortho-planar). These modules can work separately or combine into an interface with complex movement paths and haptic effects. To enable the parametric design of FlexHaptic modules, we provide a design editor that converts user-specified haptic properties into underlying mechanical structures of haptic modules. We validate our approach and demonstrate the potential of FlexHaptic modules through six application examples, including a slider control for a painting application and a piano keyboard interface on touchscreens, a tactile low vision timer, VR game controllers, and a compound input device of a joystick and a two-step button.