Development and prototyping of haptic interactions for data exploration

Haptic technology means the sense of touch can be added to computer applications. Not only can the user see and hear information, but the user can also feel it! Thus, haptics provides new, exciting ways of conveying and interacting with information.

In particular, haptics can be used to reveal the underlying data of a representation, often referred to as haptic (data) visualization, to augment available modalities (visual, auditory) or as an alternative in cases where other modalities are impractical, overloaded or not available, such as for visually impaired people. Haptic visualization is a recent area, not yet fully established, where considerable research needs to be conducted, in particular concerning effective representations and interactions to convey information. Haptic technology presents several limitations, in particular, the bandwidth of haptics is smaller than vision or audio, hence, designing effective haptic visualizations is very challenging. Therefore, this thesis first comprehensively reviews the work achieved so far in haptic data visualization and presents a solution to the open haptic overview challenge, both for a line chart application, through the combination of guidance metaphors and free exploration and a scatter plot using a force model.

While investigating the haptic visualization area and developing the line chart application, many challenges were encountered that slowed down the testing of new interaction ideas. Developing and testing new haptic ideas is not a simple task and can be time-consuming: the various haptic APIs still require the user to have good programming skills, a good understanding of haptic interactions and technical knowledge of the devices to be used. Consequently, methods to facilitate the development of haptic applications and in particular haptic interactions, crucial to haptic visualization, are needed. Therefore, these methods were investigated and led to the implementation and evaluation of a prototyping tool, HITPROTO, that aims to enable the rapid prototyping of haptic interactions by people with no programming skills.