“Stereohaptics: A Haptic Interaction Toolkit for Tangible Virtual Experiences” by Fritz, Israr, Zhao, McIntosh, Schwemler, et al. …
Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 2016
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More from SIGGRAPH 2016:
Title:
- Stereohaptics: A Haptic Interaction Toolkit for Tangible Virtual Experiences
Presenter(s):
Description:
With a recent rise in the availability of affordable head mounted gear sets, various sensory stimulations (e.g., visual, auditory and haptics) are integrated to provide seamlessly embodied virtual experience in areas such as education, entertainment, therapy and social interactions. Currently, there is an abundance of available toolkits and application programming interfaces (APIs) for generating the visual and audio content. However, such richness in hardware technologies and software tools is missing in designing haptic experiences. Current solutions to integrate haptic effects are limited due to: i) a user’s rigid adaptation to new hardware and software technologies, ii) limited scalability of the existing tools to incorporate haptic hardware and applications, iii) inflexible authoring capabilities, iv) missing infrastructure for storing, playback and distribution, and v) and unreliable hardware for long term usage. We propose “Stereohaptics”, a framework to create, record, modify, and playback rich and dynamic haptic media using audio based tools. These tools are well established, mainstream and familiar to a large population in entertainment, design, academic, and the DIY communities, and already available for sound synthesis, recording, and playback. We tune these audio-based tools to create haptic media on user’s bodies, distribute it to multiple slave units, and share it over the Internet. Applicable to the framework, we introduce a toolkit, the Stereohaptics toolkit, which uses off-the-shelf speaker technologies (electromagnetics, piezoelectric, electrostatic) and audio software tools to generate and embed haptic media in a variety of multisensory settings. This way, designers, artists, students and other professionals who are already familiar with sound production processes can utilize their skills to contribute towards designing haptics experiences. Moreover, using the audio infrastructure, application designers and software developers can create new applications and distribute haptic content to everyday users on mobile devices, computers, toys, game controllers and so on.
