hi i'm Sara Price and I'm presenting our collaborative work: the making of meaning through dyadic haptic affective touch.
Touch is important in human human relations.
It's important for creating bonds between people places and things.
It's important for communicating emotion.
And it's important for our well being.
In interpersonal relationships, for example, for enhancing positive mood, decreasing blood pressure and heart rate.
Advances in haptic technology bring new opportunities for tactile communication.
But embedding digital touch into the social sensory context of established touch communication is complex
and it raises key design issues for affective mediated communication.
Within this context this research asks how do people use synthetic haptic sensations for meaningful affective communication.
And what are the implications of this use for haptic design.
In so doing the research moves beyond general touch communication ideas of connectedness and unpleasantness
to try and better understand the mapping between synthetic tactile actuation and emotional communication.
Our paper reports empirical studies, using a purpose built tactile emoticon device,
which allows two people to send and receive messages over a distance,
using haptic sensations of vibration pressure and temperature
and can be orchestrated in terms of duration, intensity.
Here's a video demonstrating its functionality.
I'm going to insert my hand into the device.
And now I want to feel both on this device and send to the other device.
So I'm going to send to both.
First I want to feel temperature and I want to feel cold so i'm going to turn the dial in this direction.
And I can already start to feel that cooling down.
But now I want to add some pressure to both of them.
As you can see both are similar, so i'm stopping the pressure now.
and it relaxes.
So the final thing I can experience is vibration,
which i'm going to send to myself.
That feels quite nice.
And I think, maybe I want it to be a medium temperature.
Now that i'm happy with the vibration I'm going to send it to the other device again.
This system was used as a research tool to gain in depth understanding of how people use these haptic sensations for meaningful affective communication.
Given the socially oriented perspective of this work
our studies contextualize interaction through particular relationships, situations and emotionally framed communication scenarios.
So pairs of participants were romantic partners, friends, work colleagues or family.
Each pair were provided with a fictional scenario, so for example, here
for the social rejection context they were asked to imagine their friend at a social gathering.
where nobody talked to them and they were feeling rejected or excluded.
And asked to send them a touch message of support.
One sent the message and the other received the message.
Pairs of participants began with a free exploration stage where they learned how the system works
and became familiar with the different tactile qualities.
This was followed by an interaction phase where they sent touch messages to each other, based on scenarios that were given.
So, for example, in one of the studies participants were positioned in different rooms.
There was a researcher with each of the participants,
so the sender would talk through what they were doing, when creating the message,
how they were using vibration temperature pressure and intensity.
And another researcher with the recipient asked them what they were feeling and how they interpreted the message, when it was sent.
And then all pairs took part in an interview afterwards. These were video recorded for analysis.
Three key areas that speak to design emerge from the findings:
the social dimensions of touch, modalities and affective meaning, and dynamics of tactile interaction.
Since there's not time to cover all of these points i'm just going to pull out the headlines or the most interesting ones that speak to implications for design.
So, in terms of social dimensions.
participants reported the importance of a sense of presence through the physical tactile qualities and the heat or sweat from the device.
Tactile identity is the key headline finding here.
Identity was really important, so knowing who the other person was -
in the sense of physical presence being personal.
And these characteristics were conveyed through physical characteristics,
like their hand size or their knowledge of their tactile experience with the other
or their sensitivities to touch.
And this identity was central to two levels of communication that emerge.
So there's the sense of presence sort of 'I am here',
and on top of that there's the specific emotional message.
and this pointed to design implications for control,
so not only in the ability to block incoming messages or specific modalities
but also control to shift between those two levels of communication
saying 'I am here' and to a more personalised complex tactile message
In terms of modalities and affective meaning,
pressure and temperature were used in most messages.
Pressure findings were similar to findings on physical touch.
But temperature was interesting, since it was noted for the feeling of warmth and presence that it conveyed,
and this is a quality less explored in haptics.
The most notable was vibration.
Although vibration worked well for situations like conveying excitement,
this modality was found to be unnatural and at times unpleasant.
This is interesting, given the prevalent use of vibration in digital touch devices today.
The third area relates to the dynamics of tactile interaction.
Things like speed, change, duration, touch patterns.
Our findings suggested the need for a much finer control of each of these dimensions.
Where on the body and the distribution of touch was also important for the emotional content of the messages and how it was interpreted.
The key takeaway here was the foregrounding of the bi-directionality of touch.
When you touch someone you are also being touched.
Understanding the reaction of the other person is critical for participants to understand that the tactile message fulfilled its purpose,
but also to continue the tactile communication.
So, for example, if we're feeling embarrassed we could have a little tremble of the hand or very slow retraction.
Or if you wanted to show pleasurable response to a romantic touch,
it could result in a sense of the moving of the hand closer to the other.
This points to the need to consider modalities needed to capture such body reactions and responses
and to feed them back.
So overall these findings suggest the importance of personalized practices.
Tools are needed to provide users with tools that allow them to customize
and integrate their own shared meanings and understandings and to situate them in context.
Nuanced messages, the need to provide tools to customize modalities and body location for touch.
And the bi-directionality of touch and the need for tools that enable that two way interaction,
the expression of tactile identity and the bodily tactile feedback: the reciprocity of touch interaction.
This work contributes to a new problem space where the emphasis in digital touch communication shifts
from generating recognizable touches to providing tools that allow people to
determine their touches and establish a common understanding about their meaning.
Thank you for listening.