Talking about tactile experiences

By Marianna Obrist, Sue Ann Seah, Sriram Subramanian. 2013

1,490 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A common problem with designing and developing applications with tactile interfaces is the lack of a vocabulary that allows one to describe or communicate about haptics. Here we present the findings from a study exploring participants' verbalizations of their tactile experiences across two modulated tactile stimuli (16Hz and 250Hz) related to two important mechanoreceptors in the human hand. The study, with 14 participants, applied the explicitation interview technique to capture detailed descriptions of the diachronic and synchronic structure of tactile experiences. We propose 14 categories for a human-experiential vocabulary based on the categorization of the findings and tie them back to neurophysiological and psychophysical data on the human hand. We finally discuss design opportunities created through this experiential understanding in relation to the two mechanoreceptors.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Sriram Subramanian
2. Sue Ann Seah

Citations in the corpus

• UltraHaptics: multi-point mid-air haptic feedback for touch surfaces (2013, background): “Modulating different focal points at different frequencies can give each point of feedback its own independent ’feel’ [27].”