Capturing haptic experience through users’ visual sketches

Abstract

The challenges in developing haptic applications start as early as from capturing users’ requirements stage that involves haptic sensation. It is important to capture, and translate the users’ haptic experience well so that the haptic feedback integrated into the virtual environment could efficiently mimic reality similar to that in the real world. A lot of efforts have been done by researchers and developers in aiding this process but little emphasis was given to exploit the capability of sketches. Sketching has been claimed to be a powerful tool in gaining haptic characteristics perceived by users besides their verbal and written descriptions. This paper presents the relevancy of sketching in the process of capturing users’ haptic experience. This is done by reviewing previous reported findings both in haptic and non-haptic domains. This was followed by two usability studies conducted to investigate the potential of sketches in capturing haptic design requirements. The result shows the extent in which sketches would significantly help developers in describing haptic, and improve the effectiveness of the end system.