Nowadays, touch remains essential for emotional conveyance and interpersonal communication as more interactions are mediated remotely. While many studies have discussed the effectiveness of using haptics to communicate emotions, incorporating affect into haptic design still faces challenges due to individual user tactile acuity and preferences. We assessed the conveying of emotions using a two-channel haptic display, emphasizing individual differences. First, 24 participants generated 187 haptic messages reflecting their immediate sentiments after watching 8 emotionally charged film clips. Afterwards, 19 participants were asked to identify emotions from haptic messages designed by themselves and others, yielding 593 samples. Our findings indicate that the ability to decode haptic messages is linked to specific emotional traits, particularly Emotional Competence (EC) and Affect Intensity Measure (AIM). Additionally, qualitative analysis revealed three strategies participants used to create touch messages: perceptive, empathetic, and metaphorical expression.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714139
We present a qualitative study with five healthcare experts specialised in different types of touch practice to gain insight in how caring touch can be enacted. Through our analysis we focus on how to transfer this learning into design considerations towards enacting caring touch from technologies. Despite the rapidly growing expectation for and design interest in touch from technologies intending to enhance care and well-being, the knowledge on how to design caring touch is still fragmented. How caring touch is enacted in inter-personal touch is under-explored and such expertise from healthcare practitioners has not been engaged from the perspective of HCI design research. We propose designers to consider caring as an experiential quality instead of a division between instrumental types of touch and caring types. We recommend when designing for a caring quality in technology-initiated touch that designers create a progression of touch with dynamic sensitivity and adapt the materiality of actuating devices to the plural dimensions of the body's textures.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713736
Improving standing balance is critical for preventing falls and ensuring the well-being of older adults. In this paper, we present Invisible Light Touch (ILT), a mid-air haptic feedback application designed to improve standing balance by utilizing the light touch effect, a well-documented phenomenon in medical research. The light touch effect refers to improved balance when a person lightly touches a surface, such as a wall or handrail, with a force of 1 N or less. We replicate this effect utilizing focused ultrasound to create a tactile point in mid-air. When users interact with this invisible tactile point, they experience the light touch effect, which subsequently improves their balance. We conducted a pilot study with 29 participants and a user study with 25 older adults, evaluating the balance improvement by measuring the center of pressure trajectory. The results confirmed that standing balance improved significantly when using the ILT.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713396
We introduce Power-on-Touch, a novel method for powering devices during interaction. Power-on-Touch comprises two main components: (1) a wearable-transmitter attached to the user’s body (e.g., fingernail, back of the hand, feet) with wireless power-coils and a battery; and (2) receiver-tags embedded in interactive devices, making them battery-free. Many devices only require power during interaction (e.g., TV remotes, digital calipers). We leverage this interactive opportunity by inductively transferring energy from the user’s coil to the device’s coil when in close proximity. To achieve this, we engineered receiver-tags and coils, including thin pancake-coils best-suited for wearables and spherical-coils that receive power omnidirectionally. To understand which coils best support a wide range of interactions (e.g., grasping, touching, hovering), we performed technical characterizations, including impedance and 3D efficiency analysis. We believe our technical approach can inspire ubiquitous computing with new ways to scale up the number and diversity of battery-free devices, not just sensors (µWatts) but also actuators (Watts).
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713987
Virtual reality (VR) expands opportunities for social interaction, yet its heavy reliance on visual cues can limit social engagement and hinder immersive experiences in visually overwhelming situations. To explore alternative social cues beyond the visual domain, we verified the potential of haptic cues for social identification in VR by examining the effects of haptic pattern similarity on social perceptions. Unique haptic patterns were assigned to participants and virtual agents for identification, while the similarity of haptic patterns was manipulated (same, similar, distinct). The results demonstrated that participants maintained closer interpersonal distances and reported higher senses of belonging, social connection, and comfort toward agents as the similarity of patterns increased. Our findings validate the potential of haptic patterns in social identification and provide scientific evidence that homophily extends beyond the visual domain to the haptic domain. We also suggest a novel haptic-based methodology for conveying relationship information and enhancing social VR experiences.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714264
We examine the user experience of distal haptics for touchscreen input through confirmatory vibrations of on-screen touches at various on-body locations. To this end, we introduce the Distal Haptics Continuum, a conceptual framework of haptic feedback delivery across the body, organized along the dimensions of Body Laterality and Proximity to the touch point. Our results, from three experiments involving 45 participants and 16 locations across the hand, arm, and whole body, reveal a strong preference for distal haptics over no haptics at all, despite the spatial decoupling from the touch point, with the index finger yielding the highest user experience. We also identify additional on-body locations, the adjacent fingers, wrist, and abdomen, that unlock distinctive design opportunities. Building on our insights, demonstrating haptics effectiveness even when distant from the touch point, we outline implications for integrating various on-body locations, well beyond the index finger, into the user experience of touchscreen input.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713555
Driven by the vision of everyday haptics, the HCI community is advocating for “design touch first” and investigating “how to touch well.” However, a gap remains between the exploratory nature of haptic design and technical reproducibility. We present Shape-Kit, a hybrid design toolkit embodying our “crafting haptics” metaphor, where hand touch is transduced into dynamic pin-based sensations that can be freely explored across the body. An ad-hoc tracking module captures and digitizes these patterns. Our study with 14 designers and artists demonstrates how Shape-Kit facilitates sensorial exploration for expressive haptic design. We analyze how designers collaboratively ideate, prototype, iterate, and compose touch experiences and show the subtlety and richness of touch that can be achieved through diverse crafting methods with Shape-Kit. Reflecting on the findings, our work contributes key insights into haptic toolkit design and touch design practices centered on the “crafting haptics” metaphor. We discuss in-depth how Shape-Kit’s simplicity, though remaining constrained, enables focused crafting for deeper exploration, while its collaborative nature fosters shared sense-making of touch experiences.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713981