This work aims at enhancing a classical video viewing experience by introducing realistic haptic feelings in a consumer environment. More precisely, a complete framework to both produce and render the motion embedded in an audiovisual content is proposed to enhance a natural movie viewing session. We especially consider the case of a first-person point of view audiovisual content and we propose a general workflow to address this problem. This latter includes a novel approach to both capture the motion and video of the scene of interest, together with a haptic rendering system for generating a sensation of motion. A complete methodology to evaluate the relevance of our framework is finally proposed and demonstrates the interest of our approach.

Haptic technology has been widely employed in applications ranging from teleoperation and medical simulation to art and design, including entertainment, flight simulation, and virtual reality. Today there is a growing interest among researchers in integrating haptic feedback into audiovisual systems. A new medium emerges from this effort: haptic-audiovisual (HAV) content. This paper presents the techniques, formalisms, and key results pertinent to this medium. We first review the three main stages of the HAV workflow: the production, distribution, and rendering of haptic effects. We then highlight the pressing necessity for evaluation techniques in this context and discuss the key challenges in the field. By building on existing technologies and tackling the specific challenges of the enhancement of audiovisual experience with haptics, we believe the field presents exciting research perspectives whose financial and societal stakes are significant.

This paper studies the impact of interfaces allowing non-expert users to efficiently and intuitively teach a robot to recognize new visual objects. We present challenges that need to be addressed for real-world deployment of robots capable of learning new visual ¡objects in interaction with everyday users. We argue that in addition to robust machine learning and computer vision methods, well-designed interfaces are crucial for learning efficiency. In particular, we argue that interfaces can be key in helping non-expert users to collect good learning examples and thus improve the performance of the overall learning system. Then, we present four alternative human-robot interfaces: three are based on the use of a mediating artifact (smartphone, wiimote, wiimote and laser), and one is based on natural human gestures (with a Wizard-of-Oz recognition system). These interfaces mainly vary in the kind of feedback provided to the user, allowing him to understand more or less easily what the robot is perceiving, and thus guide his way of providing training examples differently. We then evaluate the impact of these interfaces, in terms of learning efficiency, usability and user's experience, through a real world and large scale user study. In this experiment, we asked participants to teach a robot twelve different new visual objects in the context of a robotic game. This game happens in a home-like environment and was designed to motivate and engage users in an interaction where using the system was meaningful. We then discuss results that show significant differences among interfaces. In particular, we show that interfaces such as the smartphone interface allows non-expert users to intuitively provide much better training examples to the robot, almost as good as expert users who are trained for this task and aware of the different visual perception and machine learning issues. We also show that artifact-mediated teaching is significantly more efficient for robot learning, and equally good in terms of usability and user's experience, than teaching thanks to a gesture-based human-like interaction.

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Haptic enhancement of touchscreens usually involves vibrating motors producing limited sensations or custom mechanical actuators that are difficult to disseminate. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach called "Touchy," where a symbolic cursor is introduced under the user's finger, to evoke various haptic properties through changes in its shape and motion. This novel metaphor enables to address four different perceptual dimensions, namely: hardness, friction, fine roughness, and macro roughness. Our metaphor comes with a set of seven visual effects that we compared with real texture samples within a user study conducted with 14 participants. Taken together our results show that Touchy is able to elicit clear and distinct haptic properties: stiffness, roughness, reliefs, stickiness, and slipperiness.

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