Haptipedia enables designers with different backgrounds and goals to browse and explore over 100 grounded force-feedback (GFF) devices. Haptify experimentally measures key benchmarking metrics for GFF devices using precise motion, force, and vibration sensors. Including these new metrics will let Haptipedia users know how each device actually performs.
A grounded force-feedback (GFF) device is a mechatronic system mounted to a stationary surface that measures the user’s motion and/or force and outputs forces and/or motions in response so that the user can feel a virtual or remote environment. Over the last three decades, researchers have invented hundreds of GFF devices. However, to design a novel device or select one that is suitable for a given task, researchers need efficient ways of accessing standardized performance specifications of existing devices. We created Haptipedia and Haptify to facilitate this process.
Haptipedia (http://haptipedia.org/) is an online taxonomy, database, and visualization of more than 105 GFF devices [ ]. Haptipedia's design was driven by both a systematic review of the haptic device literature [ ] and rich input from a diverse group of haptic designers [ ]. We iteratively developed Haptipedia by screening 2,812 haptics publications, selecting 105 papers that described a haptic device. We extracted attributes from device documentations, built a GFF taxonomy, database, and visualization, and evaluated them with users. With Haptipedia, designers can browse a growing database of GFF devices, examine their design trade-offs, and repurpose them into novel devices and interactions.
Haptify is our measurement-based benchmarking system for GFF devices with three main sensing components: a motion-capture system, a custom-built force plate, and a sensing end-effector [ ]. We carefully chose these external sensors to work for almost all existing devices in Haptipedia. Our approach to examining GFF devices is inspired by real use cases, in which the device is placed on a table and the human user moves the device end-effector while the device is either off (passive mode) or rendering virtual content (active mode). We use Haptify’s measurements to define new metrics for evaluating GFF device performance, such as global free-space forces and parasitic vibrations. These metrics enable one to quantitatively compare how devices feel to the user during similar tasks. We will soon run a study to identify the physical interrogations that expert hapticians employ when evaluating a GFF device and link Haptify measurements with interview data [ ].