Buzzing cell phones and jolty game controllers: This is where the vast majority of users today still are when they think "haptics" (interaction through the sense of touch), despite accelerating technical innovation in recent years. What will ultimately change this? Within the haptics research community and related industries, developments include pre-commercial advances in tactile and force feedback actuation and sensor development (much of it driven by the popularity and shortcomings of mobile and touchscreen interfaces). These are further spurred by advances in wearable and context-aware computing, robotics, embedded sensing and flexible graphic displays. Human computer interaction designers meanwhile seek haptic solutions to problems ranging from everyday to esoteric or highly specialized.
MacLean's group has tried to bring effective haptic interaction into people's lives by closely examining how touch (in either direction) can help address real human needs with the benefit of both low- and high-tech innovation. MacLean will give a sense of these efforts with several stories that highlight some of their driving research questions, including:
. Attention: Touch may be great way to offload the visual sense, but it can just as easily make matters worse. Through integration with contextual information, can we craft a display system with broad potential utility that is attentionally sustainable?
. Affect: What kind of affective information is available in gestural touch? If you could sense it (easily, at low cost) what are some things you could do with it?
. Pushing Robots Around: What's the right place for informal, functional touch in the close-proximity robot-human workplace?
Karon MacLean is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Canada, with a B.Sc. in Biology and Mech. Eng. (Stanford) and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. (Mech. Eng., MIT) and time spent as professional robotics engineer (Center for Engineering Design, University of Utah) and interaction researcher (Interval Research, Palo Alto). At UBC since 2000, her research specializes in haptic interaction: cognitive, sensory and affective design for people interacting with the computation we touch, emote and move with, whether robots, touchscreens or mobile activity sensors. She has innovated in human computer interaction curriculum design and teaching practices.
