Designing Pseudo-Haptic Feedback Mechanisms for Communicating Weight in Decision Making Tasks.

This paper describes our approach that uses pseudo-haptic feedback as a shikake to effectively communicate weight and stiffness with the user who is interacting with objects. Pseudo-haptics is a type of haptic illusion, which occurs when visual properties and tactile properties exhibit inconsistency, or a conflict, in terms of the model of the world a person expects to perceive. We illustrate the approach by describing our prototyped touch-based tool that uses the omni-viscosity string mechanism. The tool represents the relationships and constraints among objects connected via invisible omni-viscosity strings by having a user feel the weight and stiffness when dragging some of the objects. Through our experience of exploiting pseudo-haptic feedback for communicating weight in human-computer interaction design, the paper discusses the notions of illusion and feedforward as key elements in designing a shikake for human-computer interaction.