CoTacs: A Haptic Toolkit to Explore Effective On-Body Haptic Feedback by Ideating, Designing, Evaluating and Refining Haptic Designs Using Group Collaboration

Abstract

Designing effective haptic feedback is challenging due to the subjective nature of touch and the fact that multiple people cannot easily share and evaluate touch experiences. In this work, we propose CoTacs, a collaborative haptic toolkit to address the challenges of haptic feedback design by enabling designers to explore haptic experiences together using group collaboration and allowing them to refine ideas quickly through early feedback during the design process. Two design sessions with five collaborators each show that CoTacs enables users to design, evaluate, refine and explore haptic feedback together. Participants leveraged group feedback to improve their designs and inspire creative ideas for the second collaboration round. Our work demonstrates how collaborative haptic toolkits can enable synergistic effects through interactions between the designers, benefiting haptic feedback design while still exposing several limitations. We discuss different opportunities for the design of future collaborative haptic toolkits and haptic group collaboration techniques.

Keywords:

• Haptic feedback
• tactile
• touch
• multimodal
• design
• toolkit
• collaboration
• extended
• reality
• group
• tools
• brainstorming

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge all participants who took part in our studies.

Ethical approval

The studies of this work have been carried out in accordance with approved guidelines and regulations. Ethics approval for the research was obtained from the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee, The University of Auckland (Ref. UAHPEC1470).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Table 1. Creativity support index (CSI) results for the individual scales.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Assistive Augmentation research grant under the Entrepreneurial Universities (EU) initiative of New Zealand.

Notes on contributors

Moritz Alexander Messerschmidt

Moritz Alexander Messerschmidt is a researcher affiliated with the Augmented Human Lab at the National University of Singapore and the University of Auckland. Within his PhD, he explores the design of expressive touch feedback using unobtrusive technology in the intersecting areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), extended reality (XR), and haptics.

Juan Pablo Forero Cortes

Juan Pablo Forero Cortes is a software-hardware engineer merging expertise across physical and application layers to create impactful products at the forefront of haptics, natural interfaces, and XR. His career across academia, industry, and entrepreneurship has been fueled by a passion to transform lives, from life-saving medical devices to accessible education.

Suranga Nanayakkara

Suranga Nanayakkara is an Associate Professor at Department of Information Systems & Analytics, School of Computing at National University of Singapore. He founded the “Augmented Human Lab” to explore ways of designing intelligent human-computer interfaces that extend the limits of our perceptual and cognitive capabilities.