Vibrations provided by our smartphone inform us about notifications and events through our sense of touch. By coupling vibrations with user actions such as applying pressure on a surface, one can create illusions of a click (e.g., Apple ‘Force Touch’ trackpad) or change the perceived features of the surface (e.g., softness). While there is a large body of existing research investigating this vibrotactile feedback, designing such structured tactile messages remains a challenge. Leveraging better non-visual cues when interacting with graphical elements on touch user interfaces (UI) would lead to more refined and subtle interaction techniques. 

For this thesis, you will build a tool to design vibrotactile effects for graphical touch UIs. Using this tool, a designer should be able to load a UI element and create and refine vibrotactile effects using direct manipulation techniques. These approaches could be similar to existing approaches such as vocalizations [1], and build on existing vibrotactile libraries [2] or parametric design tools [3]. This design tool could support building novel touch feedback for the web [4], thus creating novel opportunities for designing web interactions. Using the created design tool, you will perform a user study investigating the differences in design approaches.

Focus

This work focuses on mobile design. The choice of supporting libraries and toolkits remains open for discussion with the supervisors.

Prerequisites

• Interest in vibrotactile design

• Knowledge about mobile

• Completed HCI lecture and attended at least one seminar at our chair

How to apply

Please send me an email with the following pieces of information (if you do not answer every point, your application will not be considered):

• When you plan to start the thesis

• When you plan to finish the thesis

• A short motivational statement why this topic is interesting for you

• A summary why you be a good fit for this topic

• Your transcript of records

After reviewing your application, we will come back to you and provide you with an initial evaluation assignment.

References

[1] Weirding Haptics: https://umtl.cs.uni-saarland.de/research/projects/weirding-haptics-in-situ-prototyping-of-vibrotactile-feedback-in-virtual-reality-through-vocalization.html
[2] VibViz: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/spin/vibviz
[3] Interhaptics: https://www.interhaptics.com/
[4] HapticsJs: http://www.hapticsjs.org/