Tickle Trunk: a Toolkit for Communication and Brainstorming Between Hapticians and Non-Hapticians

Abstract

This thesis introduces the Tickle Trunk, a haptic communication toolkit designed to support communication and brainstorming for haptic and tangible interaction design. Haptic technology is becoming increasingly popular in various fields, including robotics, medicine, education, and virtual reality. However, designing haptic systems can be challenging due to the need for interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. Current solutions that serve a similar purpose are specific to haptic modalities, theme or use case, or support the prototyping stage of the design process.

The Tickle Trunk is designed to address this challenge by providing a playful and approachable way of communicating haptic feedback. The toolkit is multimodal, allowing non-hapticians to experience haptic feedback and develop a better understanding of haptic sensations. The Tickle Trunk is also extensible, allowing hapticians to add new modalities as widgets to the toolkit depending on their specific needs.

The effectiveness of the Tickle Trunk was evaluated in a workshop with VR storytellers and a lab study with designers. The results show that the toolkit is effective in facilitating communication and brainstorming between hapticians and non-hapticians. The toolkit was then redesigned to make it easier to add new components to the collection of widgets, reducing authoring time and complexity.

The Tickle Trunk is open-source and will be available to the community. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the potential of haptic communication toolkits in supporting interdisciplinary collaboration in haptic and tangible interaction design.