Sensory Perception & Interaction, Research Group

Investigating the design process of expressive affective haptic robot behaviors 

Participatory design of Emotionally Supportive Swarm Robots for teenagers 

SPIN research in haptic notification and movement guidance spans a number of different project arches, as seen through associated publications.

Designed as a bland, unobtrusive appliance, Calmer is a bed for premature infants that replicates mothers' breathing movement and heart rate. 

Inspired by needs for haptic support of large motions on a surface (in embodied conceptual learning, commercial design, and 2D virtual / augmented reality), we present the ballpoint drive. This novel approach circumvents conventional constraints by imposing a new one: motion restricted to rolling on an arbitrary two dimensional surface, and grounding forces generated through friction.

Educational haptic platforms can leverage various modalities in order create effective interactive environments that can support embodied physical interactions. These platforms have the potential to leverage a student’s physical intuition to make abstract topics in physics, math, and other fields of science more concrete. 

Creating a community for experienced hapticians and newcomers to learn, share, and explore haptic resources and projects, and investigating the challenges involved in haptic experience design for both newcomers and experienced hapticians. 

Haptipedia is a comprehensive library of haptic devices annotated with designer-relevant metadata, then accessed through an interactive visualization to assist designers in finding relevant design examples.

MacaronMix is an online, open-source tool for morphing haptic signals. Designers, researchers, and hapticians can use this tool to create and study haptic icons, and to develop new morphing algorithms. Link: http://hapticdesign.github.io/macaronmix/

People describe vibrations using emotional descriptions. For example, signals can feel more or less "lively" than others. Can this language be used to stylize vibrations to feel more/less along certain emotional dimensions?