Haptic Interface Ideas

Over the course of the past week, we were given the task of coming up with three potential ideas for our 'haptic' interface ideas, which we would use as our project for this term. We came up with quite a few possible ideas, and then narrowed it down to the three that we felt could be most successful.

Alarm Clock: We were looking at playing around with the interaction with alarm clocks. We had the idea of using a pressure pad, which means you need to stand up and stand on the pressure pad to turn of the alarm, which would encourage you to stand up and get out of bed. Another idea, was to have the alarm trigger the lights in the room, so that as soon as the alarm goes off, the lights in the room turn on. To turn them off, we were thinking of either using a pressure pad (as mentioned earlier), or using a motion sensor which requires you to move to a certain part of the room to turn them off again.

Mouse Glove: This idea, which I feel would be extremely effective, was to use a motion tracking glove to replace a laptop/computer mouse. That way, you still move your hand in the movement you would with an actual mouse, although would work a bit better on uneven surfaces in comparison to a regular mouse. An idea would be to have the user then just tap one finger on the surface to 'click', and swipe two fingers to 'scroll' down the page, similar to how you would operate a laptop trackpad.

Light pads: The third idea that we decided we would present, was a way of replacing light switches in the house. This would incorporate of having a sensor pad in place of the light switch, where you simply just tap the pad to turn it on. We were considering looking at ways to swipe upwards or downwards on the pad to incorporate dimming and ways of changing the light's brightness.

We feel like all three of these ideas are quite strong, and would be exciting to work with and try to develop. We will wait til Friday's session to get feedback from the class and Stu on which ones they think we should go on to develop for this assignment.