Colloquium Details
Faculty Research Colloquium - Integrating Haptics into Multi-Sensory Interaction
| Author: | Sarah Douglas University of Oregon |
|---|---|
| Date: | January 08, 2009 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes Hall, University of Oregon |
Abstract
Multi-sensory interaction is the use of visual, auditory and touch senses for the purpose of computer display and control. While graphics and sound have been commonly used for the past fifteen years, touch (haptics) display devices have been slow to develop. Recently 3DOF force feedback devices such as the inexpensive Falcon NOVINT have become commercially available. With its ability to simulate the display of such haptics properties as roughness, hardness, and vibration, it has generated a great deal of interest and excitement for applications developers. Early success in teleoperation, limited scientific applications and video games has demonstrated the overall benefit of integrating haptics into applications; however, extending haptic interfaces into applications for data visualization and accessibility for visually disabled users has proven quite difficult. Future progress depends on answering general research questions. For example, what types and attributes of information can be meaningfully mapped to haptics? What constitutes a good mapping? Do people perceive haptic displays differently, particularly visually disabled individuals? How should haptics be combined with visualization and sonification? What haptic tools are best for which tasks? It is my belief that answering these questions will require basic research into the human perception of computer-generated haptics.
I will begin this talk with an introduction to the human sense of touch and its simulation in computer-generated haptics. I will then present a framework for haptics research and discuss several experiments conducted in my lab using the PHANToM haptics device. These experiments explore the human perception of computer-generated vibrations, 2D planes and more complex 3D Koenderink shapes. In one experiment differences between sighted and blind participants were tested. Finally, I will discuss a new project looking at user interaction for 3D rotation of visual virtual objects and the possible role of haptic feedback.
The goals of this research effort are to provide generalized guidelines for applications developers, benchmarks for the testing of haptics devices and directions to improve the engineering of both hardware and software for multi-sensory applications integrating haptics.