Simple Affective Hapticons using Web Technologies

Abstract: This paper concerns the creation of short haptic signals called hapticons and how they can be used to build affective haptic interfaces. Previous research in the area of Affective Hap-tics have mainly been focused on experiments in controlled environments using custom hardware purpose built for the study. To contrast this the hapticons created for this study uses the Vibrations API that is included in most smartphones web browsers. Can the affect of the hapticons be identified using this simple system? Participants in an online survey were tasked to classify the hapticons using a visual representation of each emotion. Each emotion corresponded to a location in the Valence and Arousal space. 16 hapticons of varied length, rhythm, intensity and roughness were created and used in the survey. The results of this study indicates that simple web based hapticons can possess the ability to express a variety of emotions, however the accuracy in expressing a particular emotion is low. Future haptic applications using web based hapticons can utilize other available modalities to achieve more accurate results. The results of this study confirm web based hapticons as an appropriate medium for future research, but highlights the need for design procedures appropriate for the medium and further analysis into the correlation between the physical properties of web based hapticons and communicated emotions.