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Ledo, D., Nacenta, M., Marquardt, N., Boring, S. and Greenberg, S. (2012)
The HapticTouch Toolkit: Enabling Exploration of Haptic Interactions. In Proceedings of the ACM 6th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction – TEI’2012. (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), ACM Press, 8 pages, February 19-22. Includes video figure, duration 4:02.
Type: Refereed conference (full paper and video figure).
Additional materials: presentation.
Earlier version: Report 2011-1012-24 (paper and video).
DOI: 10.1145/2148131.2148157
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Abstract.
In the real world, touch based interaction relies on haptic feedback (e.g., grasping objects, feeling textures). Unfortunately, such feedback is absent in current tabletop systems. The previously developed Haptic Tabletop Puck (HTP) aims at supporting experimentation with and development of inexpensive tabletop haptic interfaces in a do-it-yourself fashion. The problem is that programming the HTP (and haptics in general) is difficult. To address this problem, we contribute the HAPTICTOUCH toolkit, which enables developers to rapidly prototype haptic tabletop applications. Our toolkit is structured in three layers that enable programmers to: (1) directly control the device, (2) create customized combinable haptic behaviors (e.g., softness, oscillation), and (3) use visuals (e.g., shapes, images, buttons) to quickly make use of these behaviors. In our preliminary exploration we found that programmers could use our toolkit to create haptic tabletop applications in a short amount of time.
Keywords: Haptics, Tabletop, Touch Interface, Haptic Tabletop Puck, API, Toolkit, Rapid Prototyping, Enabling Technologies.