Haptic Interfaces

There are more and less successful uses of touch and haptics in the user interface. I'll give a few examples of both. Again, I can't imagine most of you won't have a mobile phone, probably within reach of you at this moment. It obviously uses vibrations alert to say a phone call's coming or you've had a text message or WhatsApp message, some sort of notification.

Also, it's quite likely that as you touch that phone, you might get... Some keyboards give you a little vibration back as you click keys. I know I've had to turn it off on some of mine, though, because if it doesn't get it dead right, it can actually be quite confusing. And as I said, certainly one of the virtual keyboards  I use on my phone, I tried to use it and I've just turned the vibration off. 

But as I said, that can work well or it can work not so well. And similarly, there are techniques to give you a sense of texture on phones by using vibration. In cars, if you've got some ABS brake control, which again most – unless you've got a classic car – probably will have, when you press down the brake if the ABS kicks in – so if there's a bit of a skid – even the slightest slidy-ness, you'll feel a vibration come through your pedal. Now, partly – in early days,

I think that was actually a physical effect – but nowadays that's not being generated by vibration in the car, by the brakes going on and off. But actually is being generated. But in order to train people to try and stop just short of that skidding point, you put the vibration on, which helps you know when it's happened. So that's a really positive use of  deliberate vibration, haptic feedback in the car. A slightly less successful one, although still really cool and really nice, was a system

called iDrive that BMW put into their top-end cars in the mid-2000s. And what it did, it was a knob, but it used a motor to give a sense of physical movement. So you got this clicky feeling. But the number of clicks could depend on what it was about. So if you had to... If it was controlling the volume and there was 14 settings to the volume, there would be 14 clicks. If you're controlling your menu and there are four items, there would be

four clicks, and then it would stop. You couldn't go any further.   Now I'm assuming it was because the technology was early and they couldn't quite get it right, and as I said, if you don't get these things right, they're very, very sensitive. They actually had to abandon this in a relatively short time. And so, later versions actually reverted to having a knob that really does have click stops,   even though it can't do that thing about  stopping and starting and changing the number.  

It still has haptic feedback. But it's generated  physically rather than digitally. A place where haptic feedback is used incredibly successfully is in games. Even simple controllers will often have some sort of vibration in them. But you can get – if you're a real pro-games player – you'll probably have perhaps a steering wheel or force feedback joysticks. So as you steer, you actually feel the resistance of the car, vibration of the motor, all generated.

In virtual reality as well. So games – closely related to virtual reality – there's been again very positive use of haptics for surgery training, because in surgery, it's  really crucial the feel of an instrument as you drill or as you cut or as you push.  It's really crucial, surgeons feel   the difference between different organs. So  as they work, they can tell the difference.   Slightly coming into technology at the moment,  so something you might see, but probably  

still at the edge of research and into  application, is a thing called *Ultrahaptics*. So this could be used in virtual reality. It could also be used in other sorts of settings. And it uses ultrasound to give a sense of feeling  in mid-air. The idea is you have lots and lots of little ultrasound speakers. They generate ultrasound, which creates little points in space

where they all feed up together and make a big bang. A bit like if you see waves sometimes come together and make a big splash, sometimes they cancel each other out. So you design the splash,   the sort of splash points to give a sense of  feeling; so, you can have your VR glasses on, you might see perhaps a globe in front of you. And as you reach out, you can actually *feel* that globe, even though there's nothing  there – it just didn't play now. So these things are coming. We've got a change,  both things that are working already,

but also new technologies that are finding their way through. And again, a little bit further down the stream, there's a number of materials that change their shape programmatically, currently still very much in research stage. But I think it won't be that long maybe, when we start to see this kind of thing moving its way  through into different kinds of interactions.