IEEE Haptics Symposium 2016

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – David Birnbaum, Director of User Experience Design at Immersion is leading a workshop on “Creative Haptic Expressions: Trends and Tools” at this year’s IEEE Haptics Symposium 2016.

Participating in the workshop are:

Karon MacLeand and Oliver Schneider, UBC, Canada

Fabien Danieau, Technicolor, France

Seungmoon Choi, POSTECH, Korea

Jean-François Ménard, D-Box, Canada

The workshop will cover:

Tools that afford creative expression share certain characteristics: They provide stable mappings, rich feedback, and meaningful embodied interaction. Digital tools for creative expression have matured and grown extraordinarily complex and powerful for the visual and audio domains. It’s possible to learn new techniques for digital artmaking continuously for years or decades without exhausting the creative possibilities or the fun of exploring the tools’ expressive potential.

Haptics is in a different stage. Haptic effect rendering has traditionally been the domain of systems engineers and firmware developers. Only very recently have abstract design tools for haptic experimentation begun to be developed. Many companies and institutions develop their own tools in house to meet their unique needs.

It is our belief that the logical and inevitable next step in the development of haptic creation tools is for some amount consistency to develop in the tools and approaches to creative haptic design. The goal of this open workshop is to invite leading thinkers in creative haptic design to share their learnings and expertise with their counterparts across this nascent industry, with the hope that sharing approaches and techniques leads to shared understanding and opportunities for the tools to improve.