Designing Soft+Stiff Haptic Interactions with Opensource Authoring Toolkits – Year two

Our sense of touch is vital to most daily activities we engage in, but is underused by most existing computing devices. Though haptics is an active research field, the main outcomes of three decades of research are limited to cost-effective vibrotactile feedback (as in mobile phones) or expensive force-feedback devices (mainly for surgical operation simulation). Software frameworks for haptics offer comprehensive haptics and physics simulation capabilities, however require expert engineering and software development skills. Haply Robotics offers a cost-effective force-feedback hardware toolkit. The Haply development environment targets designers and students, however its expressivity in haptics and physics simulations is more limited. There is still a huge potential for haptic applications to unleash creativity and expressivity: improving communication (as in information visualization) and interpretation (as in digital musical instrument design). Recent advances in soft robotics offer opportunities to develop soft haptics applications with greater degrees of freedom.
We will create a second generation Haply toolkit for soft haptics building upon the recent advances in soft robotics. We will create an authoring tool that support novices and experts (in design, development and engineering) compatible with both toolkit generations. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Marcelo Wanderley

Student:

Christian Frisson

Partner:

Haply

Discipline:

Music

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

McGill University