MIE: Making Haptics and its Design Accessible

KARON MACLEAN, University of British Columbia

Today’s advances in tactile sensing and wearable, IOT and context-aware computing are spurring new ideas about  how to configure touch-centered interactions in terms of roles and utility, which in turn expose new technical and social design questions. But while haptic actuation, sensing and control are improving, incorporating them into a real-world design process is extremely difficult and poses a major obstacle to adoption into everyday technology.

In this talk I’ll overview highlights chosen from of an ongoing effort to understand how to support haptic designers and end-users. These include online experimental design tools, DIY open sourced hardware and accessible means of creating, for example, expressive physical robot motions and evolve physically sensed expressive tactile languages, and major community-based studies of design practice.

To accelerate design practice, we put our systems, designs and datasets online. A central and evolving piece of our larger openhaptics effort is Haptipedia, an expert-sourced, community-based browsable visualization of historical haptic inventions as a resource to future designers.

Mechanical Engineering Building, Room 102