Category: Publications

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Touch video dataset

Touch video dataset can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-z5z-5pg9

‘You don’t know what you got ’till it’s gone’, as the lyrics to a popular song would have it. Indeed, this seems to be the case for touch in these times of social isolation, distancing, and staying at home. News media, now more than ever, cover stories about the lack of touch in elderly homes, between friends and family and how, in some cases, technology could provide some relief (the UCL In-Touch project has a nice collection of media stories). Researchers working on touch have had to move their research online in order to adhere to social distancing measures. Research being conducted covers, for example, people’s daily touch experiences (or lack thereof) and impressions of observed touch.

A few years back my colleagues Christian Willemse (previously University of Twente/TNO) and Merel Jung (now Tilburg University) and I recorded a dataset of videos showing a person’s arm being touched in different ways by different objects. Back then we were interested in how impressions of touch would depend on the type of touch and how the touch was applied (e..g, by a social robot). Now, we have made all videos we recorded available online under CC BY-SA 4.0 license: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-z5z-5pg9

We hope that the video dataset will be useful to people studying touch.

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Papers at BHCI’18

 

In a few weeks time we’ll be presenting some very nice student work at the British HCI conference in Belfast, UK. Our full paper, Virtual Nature Environments Based on Fractal Geometry for Optimizing Restorative Effects, describes work conducted by Marc van Almkerk on the use of fractals for creating restorative virtual nature environments. In the Work in Progress paper, inCrease: an Approach for Particle Enhanced Soft Composite 3D-Printed Tactile Displays, we outline explorative work by Marc van Almkerk, Casper Kessels and others, on the use of 3D printing techniques for creating tactile textures.

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Papers at EuroHaptics’16

Two papers that I (co-) authored have been accepted as technical papers at EuroHaptics’16! Both papers deal with a related line of research I have been working on, namely affective (stroking) touch sensations and pleasantness responses to such sensations. In one paper we investigated whether pleasantness responses from vibrotactile stroking sensations would be judged in a way comparable to real touch. In the other paper we looked at how visual information about the object that is touching, influences pleasantness perceptions.

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Paper accepted at IVA 2014

Our paper “With Us or Against Us: Simulated Social Touch by Virtual Agents in a Cooperative or Competitive Setting” has been accepted as a short paper at IVA 2014, in Boston, USA, as a short paper. In the paper we present an extension of the experiment that was accepted as a paper at EuroHaptics 2014, where participants interacted with two virtual agents in a collaborative game. For the IVA paper we added a competitive game mode to see whether simulated social touch by a virtual agent would result in more averse judgements of that agent. This turned out not to be the case.

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Paper accepted at EuroHaptics 2014

It has been a while since I posted anything here (the publications page is up-to-date however). But this week I received the wonderful news that our paper “Simulated Social Touch in a Collaborative Game” was accepted as a full paper at EuroHaptics 2014 in Versaille, France. In the paper we investigate the role of simulated social touch by virtual agents in a collaborative augmented reality game. We found that touch by a virtual agent enhanced participants’ perceptions of the affective qualities of this touching agent.

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Paper accepted at ACE’13

The paper entitled ” The Art of Tug of War: Investigating the Influence of Remote Touch on Social Presence in a Distributed Rope Pulling Game” was accepted at ACE’13 (Advances in Computer Entertainment). The setup and experiment were created by a group of second year (!) Creative Technology students. I was one of the supervisors of the project and helped write the paper.

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CHI’13 WIP paper

Our paper entitled “Towards Tactile Expressions of Emotion Through Mediated Touch” has been accepted as a CHI’13 work-in-progress paper. The paper describes some early work on using the TaSST as a method for emotional communication. The abstract of the paper can be found below:

In this paper we investigate the expression of emotions through mediated touch. Participants used the Tactile Sleeve for Social Touch (TaSST), a wearable sleeve that consists of a pressure sensitive input layer, and a vibration motor output layer, to record a number of expressions of discrete emotions. The aim was to investigate if these participants could make meaningful distinctions in their tactile expressions of the emotions.

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World Haptics Conference ’13 technical paper

The new year started out great for me with the message that our paper entitled “The TaSST – Tactile Sleeve for Social Touch” has been accepted as a technical paper at the World Haptics Conference 2013 in South Korea! The paper describes the early stages of development of the TaSST, a full analysis of the first user study, and a redesigned version of the TaSST (which is the one featured on the prototypes page). As usual, the abstract of the paper can be found below:

In this paper we outline the design process of the TaSST (Tactile Sleeve for Social Touch), a touch-sensitive vibrotactile arm sleeve. The TaSST was designed to enable two people to communicate different types of touches over a distance. The touch-sensitive surface of the sleeve consists of a grid of 4×3 sensor compartments filled with conductive wool. Each compartment controls the vibration intensity of a vibration motor, located in a grid of 4×3 motors beneath the touch sensitive layer. An initial evaluation of the TaSST was conducted in order to assess its capabilities for communicating different types of touch.