Events

Guidelines for Haptic Lo-Fi Prototyping Workshop

Charlotte Magnusson and Stephen Brewster ran the Guidelines for haptic lo-fi prototyping workshop at NordiCHI2008 in Lund, Sweden on 19/10/08. Here are some photos of the event.

Hands-on Haptics Workshop

In April 2005, Steven Wall and Stephen Brewster ran a workshop at the ACM CHI conference on haptic design and prototyping. The aim of the workshop was to attract a diverse range of developers, practitioners, and end users from academia and industry to brainstorm and develop novel ways in which haptic devices might be employed at the user interface, in such a way as to exploit the unique affordances offered by our sense of touch. The workshop was a great success, attracting participants from UK, Europe, USA and Canada.

Victoria & Albert Museum, Touch Me Exhibition, June - August 2005

This exhibition explored all aspects of touch and brought together artists and scientists. We ran an experiment on tactile perception, investigating the interaction between the duration of a Tacton (tactile icon) and its roughness (via amplitude modulation). Lorna Brown's work on the parameters of tactile perception showed that amplitude modulation was a key way of simulating roughness, but we did not know how long the stimuli needed to be to allow people to detect it reliably. Our study presented people with sets of two stimuli with the same length but different roughness to see what they could detect. We varied duration and the amount of amplitude modulation between the sets of stimuli.We are presently analysing the results we obtained.

Here is a photo of the exhibit, the left hand side had buttons and a games controller that allowed visitors to feel the different types of tactile feedback from current buttons and switches. The central part of the display allowed them to take part in the experiment and choose the different stimuli (presented by the purple EAI C2 tactor in the centre) using the coloured buttons. The red button on the right allowed them to feel a range of different complete Tactons.

MobileHCI 2004

Mark Dunlop and Stephen Brewster organised MobileHCI 2004 on 13-16 September 2004 in Glasgow.

"Haptic Interfaces and Applications" Special Issue of Springer Virtual Reality Journal

Steven Wall and Stephen Brewster are guest editors for this special issue that will appear in 2006. Contributions were accepted on various topics including medical applications, dextrous skill training, touch as a communicative sense and visually impaired applications.

First International Haptic and Audio Interaction Design Workshop

David McGookin and Stephen Brewster ran the First International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design in Glasgow in August/September 2006.

Second International Haptic and Audio Interaction Design Workshop

Ian Oakley and Stephen Brewster ran the Second International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design in Seoul, Korea, 29-30 Novermber, 2007. Here are some photos.

Third International Haptic and Audio Interaction Design Workshop

Antti Pirhonen and Stephen Brewster ran the Third International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design in Jyväskylä, Finland, 15-16 September, 2008.