Interactivity and Touch

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Contents

Haptic Displays

Wearable Haptic Display - Koo, I., Jung, K., Koo, J., Nam, J., Lee, Y., & Choi, H. R. (2006)

Koo, I., Jung, K., Koo, J., Nam, J., Lee, Y., & Choi, H. R. (2006). Wearable tactile display based on soft actuator. In Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006. Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 2220 -2225)

This device is a small piece of plastic that may be worn on a finger. Each device is made up of a group of pads that expand when current is run through it. Since each pad is surrounded by a harder plastic material, the pad will bulge when expanded. By controlling the amount of current passed through the device, it is possible to createdifferent haptic patterns such as braille.

The paper continues to describe the physical characteristics of the device and how it is manufactured.

With regards to pros and cons of the device, it is noted in the paper that it is cheap to produce, physically flexible, and easy to manufacture. Drawbacks mentioned by the paper mention a high power requirement. Furthermore, it is questionable whether or not the device would function well as a wearable device as pictured. One would assume that a user would have to brush their fingertip across the surface in order to "read" the display. If the device is being worn on the fingers this is not possible; Thus, the device must be able to simulate the feel of brushing over bumps by quickly raising and lowering each "pixel" in succession (akin to persistance of vision displays).

However, the paper mentions that the technology could be applied in a variety of situations such as: interfaces for household appliances, virtual reality, and automobile interfaces. It does not mention specifically how the device could be integrated into each of those applications.

Reference:

Koo, I., Jung, K., Koo, J., Nam, J., Lee, Y., & Choi, H. R. (2006). Wearable tactile display based on soft actuator. In Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006. Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 2220 -2225).


Controllers

KAT II: Tactile Display Mouse - Gi-Hun Yang and Dong-Soo Kwon

Gi-Hun, Y., & Dong-Soo, K. (2008). KAT II: Tactile Display Mouse for Providing Tactile and Thermal Feedback. Advanced Robotics, 22(8), 851 - 865.

This mouse is an attempt at creating a device which facilitates experiments regarding temperature and vibrational/textural feedback. The mouse has two features that set it apart from commodity computer mice. First, the mouse provides to the user thermal information by either heating up or cooling down. Second, the mouse has a haptic strip embedded into the middle of the mouse that the user may feel using their fingers. Through a combination of both systems, the mouse is able to emulate different surfaces. For example, a glass surface would be presented as a surface that is cold and smooth whereas sand could be presented as rough and warm.

The paper claims that users were able to successfully differentiate materials using thermal properties alone. The experiment requested that participants pick a material from a list of materials based on thermal information only. Furthermore, a second study found that thermal properties affected the perception of vibro-tactile feedback. Based on this, they conclude that temperature does indeed affect how a user will perceive texture.

The paper does not claim that the mouse can accurately reproduce different textures through temperature and vibro-tactile feedback; Rather, the mouse is intended as a tool for further experimentation in creating realistic simulations of materials through texture and temperature.


Reference:

Gi-Hun, Y., & Dong-Soo, K. (2008). KAT II: Tactile Display Mouse for Providing Tactile and Thermal Feedback. Advanced Robotics, 22(8), 851 - 865.

Z-Stretch - Chang, A. & Ishii, H.

This controller is a piece of fabric that generates different sounds based on how it is stretched.

Reference:

Chang, A., & Ishii, H. (2007). Zstretch: A Stretchy Fabric Music Controller. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME07). Presented at the 2007 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, New York, NY, USA.

Environments

Tangible Bits - Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B.

Theoretical relationship between metaDESK, transBOARD, and ambientROOM - Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997).
Examples of manipulating data on the metaDESK - Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997).

This project is a collection of individual projects related to interactivity, ergonomics, haptics, and data visualization. The collection takes the form of a room or office that is fully optimized "to bridgethe gaps between both cyberspace and the physical environment, as well as the foreground and background of human activities". Tangible Bits is made up of three different categories of components: interactive surfaces, intelligent objects (tangible computing), and ambient information. The name of each of these components is: metaDESK, transBOARD, and ambientROOM.

metaDESK

The metaDESK attempts to "push the GUI back into the real world." The metaDESK is a collection of different physical objects and a rear-projection screen. The objects include:

  • Phicons, or physical icons, are used to manipulate and control information displayed on the metaDESK.
  • activeLENS, an LCD display mounted on a flexible arm used to provide different views of the information.
  • passiveLENS, a transparent plexiglass device that changes the view on the metaDESK. The differentiation between this and the activeLENS is not clear to me.

An example application provided in the paper is called the Tangible Geospace, a mapping software. A detailed explanation can be found in the paper; However, I will provide a short summary here.

Phicons are used to anchor the map. For example, if you place a phicon of building A onto the metaDESK, the map will be displayed oriented corresponding to the placement of phicon A. If then phicon B is placed onto the map, the map is re-oriented so that both building A and building B are drawn ontop of their correpsonding phicons. In this application, the activeLENS provides a 3d view of the 2d map presented on the metaDESK. The passiveLENS is used to overlay different versions of the map (ie. satellite, topographical, or drawn) in specific places.

transBOARD

The transBOARD is a networked whiteboard meant to "explore the concept of interactive surfaces which absorb information from thephysical world, transforming this data into bits and distributing it into cyberspace".

The transBOARD accomplishes this by using phicons. The phicons for this system take the shape of magnetic cards and allow drawings on the whiteboard to be saved onto the card and reopened later or transmitted over the internet to remote locations.

The paper claims that the difference between the transBOARD and metaDESK is that the transBOARD is simply for transforming physical data to digital bits (one-way) whereas the metaDESK can transform digital bits into physical data as well (two-way). I would challenge this claim since the magnetic cards may be used to display drawing data (stored on a server) onto a transBOARD or computer.

ambientROOM

"The ambientROOM complements the graphically-intensive, cognitively-foreground interactions of the metaDESK by using ambient media ??? ambient light, shadow, sound, airflow, water flow ??? as a means for communicating information at the periphery of human perception."

The paper suggests that phicons, representing sources of information such as web-hits, may be placed near objects in the room, such as a speaker which will then present the phicon's data to the user in an ambient fashion. The example given in the paper involves a car phicon tracking web-hits to a car sales website. This car phicon, when placed beside a speaker, will cause the speaker to play a raindrop sound when there is a hit on the website. The sound would scale from individual drops to a downpour.


Reference:

Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997). Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI '97 (pp. 234???241). New York, NY, USA: ACM.

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