Haptics

We are exploring metaphors for haptic user interfaces that present and manipulate features which do not have a unique, intuitive, natural mapping into a haptic form. Simple examples include guiding the user's motion, as in the physical snap-to-grid work done recently in collaboration between Brown and UNC, and gravity relief to alleviate the strain of keeping one's hand in the air for a long time. We believe that the guidance idea in particular can be extended into a very general and useful tool. Since humans seem to process haptic input much faster than visual input, we believe that haptic user interfaces are likely to be faster and more efficient to work with. We also note that haptic interaction is ubiquitous in people's daily lives. Although other modalities can be substituted for haptics, the success of leveraging people's existing drawing skills in the Sketch interface suggests that similar gains may result from leveraging people's existing haptic interaction skills. We expect to build on the experience gained by Fred Brooks and his team in using haptics for molecular modeling [TAYL93].

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[TAYL93] R.M. Taylor, et al., "The Nanomanipulator: A Virtual-Reality Interface for a Scanning Tunneling Microscope," Computer Graphics: Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '93, August 1993.