Thread by @Dave_Parisi

At next week's @SHaptics conf in Seattle, I'm joining the @HapticsClub podcast crew for a live-on-stage episode looking back at predictions made by their guests about the future of #haptics. To prep, I'm reviewing predictions, will share some thoughts in this thread (1/n).

Tagging @EricVezzoli & @ChickTech in here to do the same, we've got 33 episodes to tear through between us, so buckle up. 1st on my list is @shorlydan on sex tech & wow I got tiny vacuum sucked into listening to this whole thing, fascinating (2/n). podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

Dan's answer starts off with a discussion of the ongoing stigmatization of sex tech by #haptics community/industry, true since field's inception & unfortunately continues today. Worth noting: the RealTouch inventor worked as a product dev for Immersion Corp (3/n)

Always curious how much haptics (as the scientific study of touch) is necessary for designing products that use 'simple' vibrations (pagers, early video game controllers & sex toys, for ex), Dan explains how his haptics background informs his approach to sex tech design (4/n).

Dan's answer here about future of sex tech & haptics is characteristically upbeat & optimistic, expects barriers to break down as future generations more open/positive about sex populate haptics field. I want a sip of what he's drinking, expecting to stay conservative (5/n).

Dan's response focuses on cross-pollination between haptics & sex tech researchers; sex tech doesn't understand vibration, haptics doesn't do well with user-friendly design: “nobody knows how to build body-safe products more than the sex tech industry does” (6/n).

Diff btw designing sex tech & haptic gloves: "we don’t have the luxury of building a slightly uncomfortable product, it has to be perfect in sexual wellness, it has to be something that fits into the hand and the user can use and experience without thinking about it at all" (7/n)

(curious to see how these answers cluster, but what I like about Dan's is it's not focused on tech--like a lot of haptics predictions--but on industry/academy/field changes & their implications) (8/n)

So much more to say on this but I gotta press on: next is Yasemin Vardar, Assistant Professor in Cognitive Robotics at Delft U, discussing her research on haptic textures, tactile interfaces & haptics textures. (9/n)
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

Conversation between Yasemin & @ChickTech gets into questions of gender parity/balance in haptics. Yasemin suggests there's better balance at academic confs than her home dept & they discuss strats for consciously including/recruiting more women to the field/industry. (10/n)

Editorializing: historian in me dislikes speaking about founders in gendered familial terms (godmothers/fathers etc), but using that lang, #haptics as a field has too many godmothers to list in a tweet. Lederman, Klatzsky, Tan (speaking @SHaptics!), Kuchenbecker. (11/n)

If we're looking at folks who started in the past decade, that list gets way longer. So a disjuncture here between industry and academic side, in terms of gender parity. Anyway...some concrete suggestions here for how to introduce kids to #haptics & hook them young (12/n).

Vardar mentions techniques for orienting kids to haptics using tablets, with a vibration on/off approach that teaches what haptics adds. Akin to Montessori's 'tactile tables' intended to help train touch, except this is an orientation to touch *tech* rather than touch exp. (13/n)

Next up: @xjasminelu & @jas_x_flowers (Jas on next week's @SHaptics program, yay!) from the Human-Computer Integration Lab @ U Chicago, discussing their work on chemical #haptics. Love this episode!
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

Another quick aside: the scope of these episodes & guests & answers is pretty amazing, reflective of the field's broad/interdisciplinary intersections. Huge credit to the @HapticsClub group esp for bringing in a nice balance of more experienced folks & early career ppl. (15/n)

On the future of chemical haptics and product design: it's messy! Huge challenge here for how to integrate these findings into future haptics devices, esp bc of safety concerns. (16/n)

Possible to mix different forms of chemical stimulation top produce a wider range of effects: hybrid sensations, amplified sensations, contradictory sensations. Interesting for asking research questions, maybe more challenging to translate into a commercial product. (17/n)

And @ManuVision responding by making leap to how this could work in VR/AR interfaces, correctly (IMO) pointing out that #haptics has focused too much on replicating realistic sensations & not enough on creating entirely new/unprecedented ones ('surrealistic haptics'). (18/n)

.@xjasminelu ref's to this as "unimaginable haptics" which pretty accurately describes where my head's at rn, struggling to conjure the sensations they're talking about here and what this sort of interface would look like in a consumer-facing product. (19/n)

In Geldard's foundational 1956 paper on tactile literacy, he describes an imaginary mechanism for transmitting Morse code via chemical stimulation; it's comically impractical/slow, which sets up his use of vibration instead. That image always strikes me as esp dystopian. (20/n)

And I can't shake it here, though Jasmine & Jas are thinking more about affective applications rather than information relay, as Geldard was. Here's Geldard on chemical Morse (from "Adventures in Tactile Literacy;" block quoted here in Archaeologies of Touch, p 184). (21/n)

In the interview, @EricVezzoli is really pressing them to think through future applications 5 years out, with mixed results...and I suspect bc this stuff is further away than that, if not outright impractical to commercialize altogether. (22/n)

Practical application areas: @jas_x_flowers mentions use of chemicals in sports medicine (cc @carlinwing), moving that to a digitally modulated interface seems very tricky!

Gotta put a pin in this for now, will pick back up w/ep 14 (Dave Birnbaum) later this week .(22/n)

Jumping back in with ep 14, where @EricVezzoli & interview former Immersion product designer & general visionary Dave Birnbaum. This one gets weird quickly & the whole ep is about predictions. Dave frequently describes haptics as "inevitable." (23/n)
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

OK just randomly 54 minutes in here I'm on a little mini-rant about how consumption in capitalist societies isn't about pure sensory experience, but instead serves a means of class stratification (aka 'playing the Veblen card') & I can't believe they invited me back 😉. (24/n)

Debate between Dave & Eric about the value of real vs virtual experience: how much of the sensory real needs to be re-created in order for us to find it sufficiently compelling? Really enjoying this exchange. (25/n)

Lots of 'spirited exchanges' among us three, incl discussion about declining cinema attendance & what role haptics (@dboxtech for ex) can play is getting asses back in (rumbly) seats. (26/n)

Totally wild episode, lots of stuff from the work Dave B did w/Immersion is part of what we can think of as the alternative future of haptics, had things broken differently. True for a lot of lab research as well, but Imm had product dev baked into research process. (27/n)

Squeezing/warming wristband: “We didn’t really think about it as a hugging interface, but we realized that when you squeeze the wrist gently & add warmth, people who had never thought about this before would just blurt out ‘Oh my god it feels like a warm hug on my wrist.” (28/n)

Birnbaum riffing: “In a world where we have perfect haptics, what does that mean for how we interpret reality? But then there’s another thing, where what does perfect haptics mean, is that even a thing, or are we just using perfect haptics to mean reality is broken?” (29/n)

Could get sucked into this one for ages, Dave B's laying out his notions of 'cartographic collapse' and 'sensory abundance' that would accompany the hypothetical rise of what we're talking about as 'perfect haptics'. (29/n)

Lots of techno-optimism in the #haptics community & nowhere is that more evident than in Dave B's take on the possible future of the tech & its potential social ramifications. I don't share that optimism but it's a pleasant world to step into if you ignore its cracks (30/n).

Next up is Ranjini Raghuveer. Another former Immersion person, Raghuveer was in charge of product management for automotive haptics, so that's where this thread is turning now. (31/n)
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

Raghuveer: Main focus on haptics for touchscreens, incorporation of touch/vibration feedback, haptic touchscreens in cars limited now but projected to increase substantially in coming years. (32/n)

V interested in this topic bc it seems like automotive has been a projected growth area in #haptics for a while now & I haven't seen where that's filtered out. Now even seeing return of buttons as a luxury feature, away from touchscreens, so not as much need for haptics. (33/n)

Which obviously is a recognition that touch is so important that we need to bring it back, just not through vibration that signifies materiality but instead through hard material interfaces. (34/n)

Back to Raghuveer: big push beyond touchscreens/vibration coming, including haptics in seats, steering wheels, trying to replicate feel of engine rumble (sometimes considered a detrimental byproduct) in electric vehicles. (35/n)

Possibilities for smart surfaces: “Things that can morph according to whatever is happening. Imagine having these morphing buttons within your car [...] You don’t have to clutter the whole interior …As you need it, it comes up, as you don’t need it, it goes back..." (36/n)

Continued: "And that’s pretty cool. So it gives you the kind of Minority Report feel of controlling things around you.”

A sense in this convo (esp w/@ManuVision, Raghuveer's colleague @ Immersion) that vibration is kind of a boring/obvious use case for car haptics. (37/n)

Just finished a piece for @micronarrative & @ggoggin's Companion to Mobile Media on "mundane haptics" & this is the premise: vibration alert/notification/button haptics as something to be moved beyond in favor of more exciting/transformative uses. That's the story here. (38/n)

Next up, super excited for this discussion w/@hasti_seifi & Hannah Elbaggari & Samantha Melnyk on the Learn Haptics Project, recalling the 'haptics pedagogy' theme w/@ysmnvardar from earlier in the thread. (39/n)
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

Goal of @hasti_seifi's research: to make haptics more broadly accessible & understandable, Elbaggari looking for ways to "democratize" haptics (also a big theme for @interhaptics design tools). (40/n)

.@hasti_seifi predicts most progress over the next few years will come in mixed reality & gaming, very high expectations for ultrasound haptics, despite some of its limits. (@ultraleap just announced new transducers for midair/ultrasound haptics). (41/n)

https://twitter.com/ultraleap/status/1587831569640611840

Elbaggari addresses growth in the field coming from increased community interactions/engagements, spaces like @HapticsClub & other hacker/maker groups pushing design/experimentation from ground up (persistent problem for #haptics, most work happens in academy/industry). (42/n)

Melnyk stresses need for low-cost devices to gain traction, as a way to drive experimentation & play. Consensus among hosts too that community engagement w/haptics has been lacking for a while now (and def part of what @HapticsClub is trying to fix!). Too much top-down. (43/n)

Next up (prob not today): another of my fav episodes, this one w/Immersion vet/former CTO @ullrichx, giving a grounded view of failures of haptics & also hopes for future development, had a front-row seat in his time at @HapticsDev. (43/n)

Quick aside: been plenty critical of Immersion, but having a pour-one-out moment for these folks, now that IMMR's shitcanned everyone w/talent & vision to focus solely on IP enforcement/suing the fuck out of anyone who puts a vibration motor in anything (cc @danbasslet). (44/n)

They're basically the centralized repository of everything that's happened in the industry since the 1990s, but that stuff is all lost now or locked behind a corporate gate. Anyway, hopefully that's changing now w/a plurality of companies in the space. (45/n)

Picking it up with former @HapticsDev CTO Chris Ullrich (@ullrichx) now: with Immersion, he thought primarily about products/devices that could scale, a much different orientation from academic lab-based research. (46/n)
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

So what we can think of as the "massification" of #haptics, not just cool tech that works under carefully controlled test conditions, but applications that're feasible to deploy. Different orientation to development. (47/n)

A lot this massification is aspirational--haptics doesn't succeed unless it can scale, unless it can be massified--and there's an open question of how much vibration feedback counts as a successful fulfillment of that mission (I take this up in my #MundaneHaptics chpt). (48/n)

Fascinating historical narrative from Chris: in '90s, everyone in haptics was focused on kinesthetic haptics, because the field grew out from telerobotics--vibration was "weird" & mostly associated w/sensory substitution, was sort of a "dark horse." (49/n)

Now, we've reached the "zenith" of the value that can be added with vibration, so Ullrich's wondering what's next--what haptic stimulation can work in concert with vibration, at scale, to create new experiences and add new value for users? Surface haptics one possibility. (50/n)

Crystallizes it perfectly, the question with vibration & haptics: "is that all there is?" and looking ahead, he's not quite sure where that's heading...he's reserving thoughts for now. That's where industry is sort of stuck right now, vibration has peaked. (51/n)

“In the next 10 years, I guess my hope is that we find the thing that can be as compelling as vibration and work in concert with it and work at a level that can be scaled out in creating value for all these users of all these devices and services around the world.” (52/n)

Next, the "godfather of haptics" Vincent Hayward (EH Weber shoots up from his grave and waves his rotted arms). Highly recommend this episode, like Chris's interview, this provides vital historical background. (53/n)
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

Hayward's fascinating bc he thinks so expansively about the field, not just in terms of stimulus (electrotactile) but also stimulus targets, thinks the feet (#HapticFeetback) are complex and underutilized. (54/n)

Looking at the future, describes the @actronika vest & expects more wearables over the next 5 years, not inventing new devices but applying what's already been developed. (55/n)

Pressing him a bit, @ChickTech looks back on history of stuff that's been tried for a while in labs w/out widespread adoption & asks what might get dusted off. Hayward mentions surface haptics as potentially viable despite challenges of power consumption & actuator quality (56/n)

Haptics is still fairly marginal, despite its long history & recent success, anyone who gets into this field becomes an evangelist not just for touch tech but for touch itself. This line from Hayward illustrates that perfectly: (57/n)

“the visual world is really boring, compared to the haptics world, which is much more varied and dynamic. Vision scientists actually admit it, the visual world is quite static, things move fast and you don’t see them..." (58/n)

"...The mechanical world is incredibly more varied and has many more dimensions, many more viability, so that will be reflected in the devices and the algorithms.” Hapticians are activists in a conflict over sensory hierarchies. (59/n)

Another cool one coming up here, @ntoineWD of @haplyrobotics, discussing surgical #haptics (cc @jsnrchr). Good discussion about how people get started in haptics, what hooks them in & how haptics can enhance education & learning (60/n)
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

Really interested in how to expand the field out from engineers to be more accessible to a broader range of creators (which we've seen a bunch of tools try to address over the years, the coveted "Photoshop for touch" 🙃), a theme coming up consistently in these interviews! (61/n)

Last one of my set is Elisa Santella, managing director at Grewus. Focusing mainly on her domain of automotive, Elisa identifies smart surfaces & designers as central to the future of automotive haptics. (62/n)
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…

On the surfaces side: taking interior surfaces of cars that aren't currently responsive & making them interactive will change our exp of interfacing with cars. On the designers style: way more attention to haptics & touch in thinking about interior/interface design. (63/n)

Assumption that self-driving cars are on the way prompts thinking about the car as an entertainment site, Santella suggests this will make us more attentive to questions of tactile feel. Like Varder, she's thinking away from vibration touchscreens. (64/n)

FWIW (and dunno if @sivavaid will remember this from my proposal defense bitd): there's been a promise around automotive haptics for ages now, BMW's push was for haptics that could "help restore connection" between driver & vehicle, that was 2004ish. (65/n)

Santella also suggests the target areas for haptic feedback will broaden out from the hands, to include other sites in contact with the vehicle: seats (#AssHaptics), armrests, pedals (#HapticFeetback), etc. More ways for car to communicate w/driver. (66/n)

Now @EricVezzoli's pushing on something that came up in Haptics Industry Forum: if car is communicating, is it doing so intelligibly? What happens if I learn the tactile lang my Mazda speaks, then I rent a BMW? Will OEMs standardize language of notifications? (67/n)

Santella hopes they'll standardize, but suspects they won't. @EricVezzoli says this is esp important bc decoding a notification from a car is critical life-or-death scenario. (68/n)

FWIW when this came up in HIF around mobile #haptics, Apple in typical Apple style suggested it had no interest in standardizing haptic languages bc theirs would be better than their competitors'. Which, how's that working out? (69/n)

Super interesting from @EricVezzoli: w/automotive, this could be addressed by regulations. This question of how to regulate haptics doesn't come up much, but it should, because esp remote touch implicates the physical world in potentially dangerous & traumatizing ways. (70/n)

OK, that wraps up my set! Excited to tease out shared themes in these answers w/@EricVezzoli & @ChickTech at next week's @SHaptics. Going to do @threadreaderapp unroll thing now and get these all in one place.