The Haptiverse: A Platform for Reuse of Haptic Content

Abstract

Research into haptic technology has accelerated over the past decade, producing more devices and content than ever before. However, due to the innate diversity of its hardware and the sense of touch itself, existing haptic experiences are limited to a specific physical technology or interaction modality. To remedy this, we introduce the Haptiverse, a platform for reuse of heterogeneous haptic content. The collection will be designed to internally motivate hapticians, who are designers, researchers, or developers of haptic experiences, to share their work with the global haptics community. We implement design features to target each basic psychological need in order for users to feel internally motivated to continue to share their work using the collection. Our results show that there was a positive influence in users’ perceived competence when interacting with a multi-step form to upload content. Users’ perceived relatedness and autonomy were also positively influenced after reading the Haptiverse’s mission statement. In addition, novice hapticians reported higher levels of perceived relatedness after reading a mission statement that incorporated both autonomy and relatedness intrinsic goals. We present a minimum viable product of the Haptiverse and design recommendations to further support hapticians when sharing haptic content.