Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group

Grounded force-feedback devices employ diverse mechanical, electrical, and computational designs, making it difficult to assess their quality fairly. Device specifications often have little relation to the opinions experts report during handson testing. To close this gap, we invited 16 haptics experts to evaluate four representative devices rendering stiff spheres while we recorded data with Haptify, our measurement-based benchmarking system. Our results indicate that expert opinions of each device’s maximum renderable stiffness correlate with a performance metric based on measured vibrations. This approach of pairing expert assessments with external measurements promises a systematic way to characterize the capabilities of haptic devices.