Tactile Animation by Direct Manipulation of Grid Displays

Oliver S. Schneider, Ali Israr, Karon E. MacLean
2015 Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology - UIST '15  
Figure 1 : Concept sketch for tactile animation. An artist draws an animated sequence in the user interface and the user experiences phantom 2D sensations in-between discrete actuator grids. The animator controls phantom sensations directly, feeling the sensation in real-time to design expressive sensations for arbitrary vibrotactile arrays. ABSTRACT Chairs, wearables, and handhelds have become popular sites for spatial tactile display. Visual animators, already expert in using time and space
more » ... portray motion, could readily transfer their skills to produce rich haptic sensations if given the right tools. We introduce the tactile animation object, a directly manipulated phantom tactile sensation. This abstraction has two key benefits: 1) efficient, creative, iterative control of spatiotemporal sensations, and 2) the potential to support a variety of tactile grids, including sparse displays. We present Mango, an editing tool for animators, including its rendering pipeline and perceptually-optimized interpolation algorithm for sparse vibrotactile grids. In our evaluation, professional animators found it easy to create a variety of vibrotactile patterns, with both experts and novices preferring the tactile animation object over controlling actuators individually.
doi:10.1145/2807442.2807470 dblp:conf/uist/SchneiderIM15 fatcat:pgu5bodignb6vpkzs7thhtle6q