Expanding the Universe of Haptics | by Lofelt | Aug, 2020 – Medium

Haptics is hard. Transmitting touch over long distances using electrical signals rendered by a computer interface, or simulating the tactile materiality of a virtual world, presents a wide range of challenges. The sense of touch is complicated and variegated; the mechanisms by which it functions the foundations of our tactile reality have historically been understudied in psychology, physiology, and neuroscience, in comparison to studies of seeing and hearing. As a sense distributed throughout the body, composed of a range of different submodalities (including movement, pressure, temperature, and pain) it is difficult and perhaps impossible to design a machine that comprehensively stimulates the sense of touch. The hurdles for haptics are not strictly technological and scientific: it is not just a question of designing haptics applications that work well in the lab, or of gaining a deeper and more holistic understanding of how touch operates. As any haptician knows and as the diverse array of haptics devices already developed and abandoned attests to these are certainly immense obstacles that at times appear insurmountable.

But there is also a cultural challenge involved in bringing haptic devices out of the design lab in ways that are meaningful to their imagined users. Theres a tendency among hapticians to assume that their own enthusiasm for the technology extends to the broader public. Its an understandable impulse, given that those drawn to the field are often motivated by a sort of humanistic desire to bring touch to computing: if touch is the most fundamentally human of our senses, and if it is increasingly absent from interactions in a society dependent on computer-mediated communication, then restoring touch entails a restoration of the human. However, not everyone shares this belief. For potential users who may be skeptical or disinterested, how does one explain the value that haptics can add to experiences with digital media?

For a long time, the haptics industry has answered this problem by overpromising and overhyping its forthcoming products, aided and abetted by a popular press that frequently covers new haptics discoveries in a fervent, celebratory, and uncritical tone, with tech companies and the popular technology press situated in a synergistic relationship. Articles (and, especially article headlines) that sensationalize the potential of haptics technologies make for alluring and evergreen clickbait. Such stories announcing the impending arrival of new devices mobilize and rehearse what I have called the dream of haptics: a vision of fully-realized haptic devices that provide a type of photorealism for touch, restoring the missing tactile dimension to our interactions with computers. The problem with this dream of haptics is that it is conjured around virtually every instantiation of the technology, no matter how minor. Each instantiation, accordingly, carries the burden of realizing this dream and is destined to fall short of these promises. This has been a character of haptics marketing and journalistic writing about haptics since at least the late 1990s.

Its easy to understand how this happens: of course those drawn to work in the field of haptics are enthusiastic about it haptics tends to get overlooked in favor of a focus on graphics or audio.

Interestingly, psychologists who worked on touch have consistently lamented, going back at least to the 1950s, that research on the psychology of touch is overlooked in favor of research on the psychology of seeing and hearing: touch, as the lament goes, is considered the neglected sense in everything ranging from psychology to aesthetics to engineering.

In the push to make haptics research legible and compelling, hapticians both haptics marketers and haptics engineers fall back on a set of well-rehearsed tropes about the technology and its immense impact. Journalists, too, revert to a familiar and comfortable framing of haptics as both immanent and transformative; if they do offer qualifiers about the feasibility of these complex devices coming to market, they are often buried toward the end of the article, leaving readers with the impression that they can expect to see these advanced haptics applications distributed ubiquitously in the near future.

For one very recent example, check out the headlines for and reporting on the HaptiRead midair Braille haptic system: these articles contain little mention of the fact that the application is still in the very early stages of research; similarly, reporting on haptics patents often conflates the patenting of a technology with its impending arrival.

So its clear that theres a future orientation to the framing of haptics: a thing youll someday have that adds a fantastical dimension to your experience with existing technologies.

BoingBoings Mark Frauenfelder, commenting on the haptics in the Wii Remote in an early review: It feels like magic. I love it.

The challenge is to foster an appreciation for and understanding of current-generation haptics applications, while explaining how they have and have not lived up to the dream of haptics. Those working in the field would do well to acknowledge and embrace the fields historicity: confront the dashed hopes and failed promises, explain why haptics hasnt lived up its lofty and transformative aspirations, and then finally, as a positive step, show how haptics already has changed the way we interact with digital devices.

Skepticism about the technologys capacity to meet the lofty promises made around it has been present since haptics began to cohere as an industry way back in the 1990s. In an article published on the eve of Immersion Corporations 1999 IPO, one market analyst assessed the state of haptics: Its still very much a nascent technology [] It hasnt lived up to its promise. It could become a part of every PC, or it could just fade away. Im not seeing anything yet that says, wow, youve really got to go out and buy it.

Logitechs senior vice president in that same piece, commenting on vibration-enabled computer mice: we believe that mice using FEELit technology will revolutionize the way people interact with their computers.

Evaluating the analysts concerns over 20 years later, it certainly seems correct that haptics still hasnt lived up to its promise. But haptics has become a part, not of every PC, but of every smartphone, wearable, and game console: almost without notice, we have become accustomed to decoding the variegated patterns of vibrations constantly emanating from these devices. Gradually, we acclimate to this language of vibrations, acquiring a device-specific and platform-specific tactile literacy: an ability to read the messages being sent to us through our skin by a range of digital devices. One does not have to be a trained haptician to notice, for example, that the vibration pattern reminding a FitBit wearer to take 250 steps that hour (two quick jolts) is perceptibly distinct from the celebratory burst of vibrations that rewards the wearer for hitting their 10,000 step daily target (a few short bursts of vibration, followed by a couple of longer ones wrist fireworks that correspond with the display on the screen). Similarly, the vibration pattern indicating an incoming call differs from the pattern used to announce the arrival of a text message, which may both be distinct from the vibratory message alerting the user that the devices battery is running low.

The problem with such vibratory languages, however, is that they lack stability and cohesion. Different actuators found in different devices produce different sensations; phone operating systems and specific applications use vibration alerts inconsistently; and the impulse to overuse vibration notifications could be leading to what Ben Lovejoy called haptic overload, with app developers competing for bandwidth on the haptic channel. So what might otherwise be trumpeted as a major victory for haptics gets muted somewhat by the lack of a shared tactile vocabulary across devices and applications. There are a host of reasons for this fragmentation: a lack of standardized design tools, competition between companies each pushing their own vocabularies, intellectual property concerns, and so on.

However, the important consequence, culturally, concerns the inability of haptics to cohere around a unifying language of vibrations. We may each informally acquire an understanding of the way an individual device communicates to us through haptics, but that literacy becomes obsolete when we move to a new device. When the Apple Watch was announced, for instance, some suggested that the Taptic Engine would usher in a new era of tactile communication, with vibration communication stealthily transforming the way we interact with our devices. Here again, we find another failed promise of haptics: if the Apple Watch provided a new language of touch, where was the dictionary for this language? How did Apple go about training users to read by touch? And did it educate designers on how to best write for this new language of feel?

To their credit, Immersion Corporations efforts on this front were far more systematic: its proposed Instinctive Alerts framework was ambitious in providing over 40 distinct vibration patterns, each attached to specific messages, capable of running on any single-actuator device. Apples Core Haptics provides an impressively detailed set of guidelines for developers, but the moment of excitement around smartwatch and smartphone haptics appears to have been eclipsed somewhat by the renewed hope for VR haptics that followed the commercial release of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

If we broaden this conversation outward to encompass video game controller rumble, which has been a standard feature of console controllers since 1997, we see a similar problem: video game players have acquired a variety of languages of touch, specific to individual games and individual game genres, but game design lacks robust training programs in haptic effects programming, so the haptic vocabularies of games remain haphazardly assembled and fragmented. And vibration feedback in games, too, has been continually framed since its inception as an imperfect instantiation of haptics that will inevitably be overcome with the rise of some new and improved feedback mechanism (it is only recently, first with HD Rumble in the Switch and now with the impending release of Sonys DualSense controller, that this promise is being fulfilled).

That strategic distancing of current generation from next-generation might just be a common marketing maneuver, but it perpetuates the always-on-the-horizon dream of haptics a continual feeling that the dream is bound to be deferred.

I would put this challenge to hapticians: instead of speaking in the language of haptics will, begin thinking in terms of haptics has. Rather than projecting the impact of haptics based on the assumed widespread adoption of fantastical and expensive pieces of hardware, try to convey a sense of what is possible given existing technologies. This is not to suggest that the field should run from dreaming big many of the just-on-the-horizon devices represent significant steps forward for haptics in terms of hardware sophistication and use case diversity, the result of creatively-conceived and carefully-executed research programs but instead, to argue that the field would be better served by not continually pinning its hopes on the uptake of unavoidably expensive new hardware. Moreover, being realistic about the capabilities of current generation devices and circumspect in the forecasted impact of future devices would go a long way toward restoring some of the fields strained credibility. And finally, haptics research has primarily operated with a top-down model, driven by those in industry and the academy, rather than being pushed forward by the interests and agitations of those working outside of professional contexts.

Hapticians would do well to emulate Kyle Machiluss focus on community engagement with his open source Game Haptics Router sex toy control software, which emphasizes adaptability to the various uses different communities might want to put it to. Building haptics applications up from a foundation of community interest would help ensure that the hype around haptics is more than just a product of industry enthusiasm echoing through popular press click-chasing (Dave Birnbaums INIT podcast is a significant step toward growing this sort of public-facing intellectual culture around haptics).

With much of the world and the US in particular still struggling to adapt to the physical distancing protocols required to slow the wildfire spread of COVID, we might also consider the use cases that would be the most immediately beneficial to people, in terms of restoring a lost feeling of connection to those in their affective networks. Broadening our understanding of touch technologies to include this cultural dimension will increase the kit of available tools to help meet the difficult challenges facing those wishing to expand the universe of haptics.

About the author: David Parisi researches the cultural and historical aspects of touch technology. His book Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with haptics from Electricity to Computing, provides the first comprehensive origin of haptic interfaces, offering vital insights on the development and future trajectory of technologized touching. A sample of Davids book is available here.

Twitter: @dave_parisi

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Expanding the Universe of Haptics | by Lofelt | Aug, 2020 - Medium