HapSync - Exploring Emotional Interactions Through Haptic Vibrations

Abstract

This project was meant to explore social connection between people through haptic interfaces based on tactile vibrations, but it ended up being a reflection on how technology has been influenced by our understanding of human cognition and how new trends in cognitive science can help to create interfaces that make our digital interactions emotional, rich and engaging. It started with an open and experimental approach to the space, which helped to understand processes of participatory sense-making through tactile vibrations and the usage of haptic vibration interfaces for communication. This shaped the image and set foundations of what was possible to achieve as a final interaction. The result was an interface that allowed people to emotionally connect using their breath as an input to create haptic vibrations. To do so, a new concept called Vibrification was used, a technique inspired by Sonification that transforms data, in this case biosignals, into tactile vibrations. We successfully tested that Vibrified biosignals are an input that participants perceived as emotionally intense and that allowed them to react and feel the other’s presence. During the tests, the vibrations helped participants to concentrate on the breathing exercise and created an immersive and intense interaction with themselves and each other. The experience was highly rated and participants praised the interface in helping them to feel their breath when they were feeling themselves, and eliciting an emotional and empathetic response when feeling each other. Most of the technology and development was done in house, developing sensors, designing interfaces and programming software that allowed the experiments to happen. This is the main contribution of this project, in the search for emotional social interaction, we propose a new way to design for haptic interaction. Vibrification of biosignals is a new approach that enables us to capture and share human experience to design new ways in which to emotionally connect through technology, inspired by the wide range of possibilities that we, as humans, have to experience the world, ourselves and each other.