Affective Haptics for Enhanced XR
Organizers:
Dr. Mounia Ziat, Bentley University, mziat@bentley.edu
Abstract:
Our emotions play an important role in our interaction with the world. In real-life situations, they affect positively or negatively our lives. The replication of our world into virtual environments has been in human minds as early as 1935; the year Stanley G. Weinbaum published his short novel “Pygmalion Spectacles” that described the first head-mounted display (HMD). On one hand, we have never been closer to Weinbaum’s vision eighty-five years later. The technology progress related to XR headsets, from hardware and software perspectives, has been impressive and cutting edge. On the other hand, despite this technological advance, we are still far away from Weinbaum’s ultimate vision of an immersive world that not only includes all our five senses, but also provides us with qualia begotten of the virtual experience. Pick up a rose, smell its scent, feel the pricks of its thorns or the soft velvet of its petals on your finger. These sensations are what ground us in reality. Now, think about a rose in a virtual reality (VR) world. Despite a high-fidelity virtual rendering of the rose, your experience of a virtual rose would be completely different from that of a real one. Touching and smelling the rose would trigger emotions that would be hard to replicate in the virtual world. The experience would be different in a Mixed Reality (MR) or Augmented Reality (AR) environment depending whether the user is interacting with a real rose that is virtually augmented. Different haptic technologies are being used to add tangibility to virtual entities in these Extended Reality (XR) worlds enhancing, therefore, users’ immersion. Creating strong emotions remains one of the goals of XR. However, one obstacle that users face to reach some sort of emotional qualities is the lack of tangible interaction. This workshop focuses on the affective and emotional aspects of haptic technologies. It is not enough to only focus on the reproduction of the mechanical stimulation, it is also crucial to understand how the haptic technology triggers emotions within the XR worlds. Emotion classification remains a contested issue, as multiple models and several measures are available and they are rarely without any flaws. Speakers in this workshop would try to tackle the difficult task of understanding the complex map of emotions in touch, from basic affective feelings to more complex mental emotional construction, by detailing their approach and research to help provide haptic guidelines and considerations for designers about the affective dimensions for an effective haptic-XR interaction.