AirPinch – An Inflatable Touch Fader with Pneumatic Tactile Feedback

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of our work-in-progress prototype of a textile-pneumatic force-feedback system that augments the user-interaction on touch-sensor strips with interactive tactile cues. Air-pressure inside a shape-changing textile actuator is dynamically modulated, to create a perceivable pinch-like impression at the user's fingertip. This dynamic pneumotactile pinch can be leveraged as a tangible output modality for interaction design. The soft actuators are driven by a pneumatic control system that adjusts the pneumatic pressure in response to the finger position. We have explored different textile air-chamber layouts to achieve tactile feedback and provide a preliminary discussion of their tactile capabilities and design patterns. We further give a brief overview of three different pneumatic control system architectures and their underlying tactile pressure profiles used to operate the actuators to create different types of tactile sensations. A preliminary discussion of the capabilities, challenges, and limitations of our system is also provided.

Impact of softness on users’ perception of curvature for future soft curvature-changing UIs

“…= 4.38, p<0.05;(3,33) = 4.44, p<0.01), but not for the frst stimulus ( (3,33) = 2.59, p=0.07). Post-hoc tests confrms the signifcant diference in exploration time between the softest condition (Shore 00-10) and the rigid condition (Table3in appendix A).…”

“…This exception suggests that in the fattest condition (R ref =40 mm), participants need a much longer exploration time (all for the frst stimulus, the second stimulus, and their average) when exploring the softest (Shore 00-10) stimuli than other softness conditions including its neighbor softness condition (Shore 00-50). ANOVA shows that in the two curviest conditions (R ref = 10 and 20 mm), the impact of softness on the exploration time is not signifcant, neither for the frst stimulus, nor for the second stimulus, nor for their average in softer conditions (R ref = 10 mm: In the fattest condition (R ref =40 mm), ANOVA shows a signifcant impact of softness on the exploration time, both for the second stimulus and for their average in softer conditions ( (3,33)…”

“…Prior work enabled devices capable of changing their softness, e.g., through jamming [20,80]. Adding a jamming layer on top of an existing shape-changing device such as LayerPump [28], dynamically changeable buttons [32,40], the infatable hemispherical display [83], PneUI [97], AirPinch [33], MultiJam [96], Pneumatic Auxetics [16], StringTouch [73], or PneuSeries [8], allows building devices providing haptic feedback through both softness and shape. The jamming layer can follow the shape of the shape-changing device, thanks to its malleability prior to jamming [80,97].…”