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.