Avant Garde in Digital Media: Review of "The HAPTICTOUCH Toolkit" presented at TEI 2012
Building on the work of the Haptic Tabletop Puck, the creative of which two of the paper's authors were members, the HAPTICTOUCH Toolkit was designed to make programming for Haptic devices faster to prototype and more intuitive for the novice by incorporating a graphical user interface and removing the need for large amounts of code. That’s not to say that the toolkit was developed to be a replacement for the current system of code, on the contrary, much like the Arduino project the impetus was to open up the world of producing haptic content for devices such as the Microsoft Surface available to the general population.
Using the Haptic Tabletop Puck (HTP) as a bi-directional haptic device the user is able to feel haptic information presented to them through the puck but crucially is also able to send information back through the puck affecting the image on screen. In the video above this is shown by two users remotely agreeing on a seating plan, taking ownership of a decision to place the table in one area by applying more pressure to the device than their counterpart this has the effect of reducing the chance of a misunderstanding occurring and eliminates the need for verbal clarification. With this in mind the HAPTICTOUCH Toolkit is made up of three layers that the user can program for the Raw Layer, the Behavior Layer and the Graphical Haptic Layer.
One of the things I'd like to have seen more in the paper would have been plain english examples. The paper itself goes into extreme detail on many aspects of the project the different layers could be better described with the use of an example. The Graphical Layer has many everyday uses take for instance the act of buying something online. With the use of haptic buttons and their three different states (inactive, hover and pressed) a user can add something to their cart and proceed to the checkout page but when the Confirm Order button is pressed they can be asked to apply more pressure to this final click to make their purchase eliminating the annoying notice “Are you sure you want to purchase these items” which has become commonplace in the digital age.
Overall the goals behind the HAPTICTOUCH Toolkit are sound and their testing suggests that people adapt well to making haptic applications with the kit very quickly with little or no experience of the field. However the three examples of users work shown below seem to rely heavily on Haptic information supplementing the Graphical information on screen.
I'd like to see someone use the system to program an application that changes the graphics on screen to complement the haptic feedback coming from the user, this in my opinion could yield some innovative and abstract results.
Above is a word cloud of the keywords featured in the HAPTICTOUCH project's paper. More information on the HAPTICTOUCH Toolkit can be found on the website of one of it's developer's Sebastian Boring or by reading the paper submitted to the TEI 2012 conference which is presented here by the University of Calgary. The paper for the Haptic Tabletop Puck can be found here.