HAPPINESS: Haptic Printed Patterned Interfaces for Sensitive Surfaces

The main goal of the HAPPINESS (Haptic Printed Patterned Interfaces for Sensitive Surfaces) project is to develop a smart conformable surface able to offer different tactile sensations via the development of a Haptic Thin and Organic Large Area Electronic technology (TOLAE), integrating sensing and feedback capabilities, focusing on user requirements and ergonomic design. To this aim, by gathering all the value chain actors (materials, technology, manufacturing, OEM integrator) for an application for the automotive market, the HAPPINESS project, will offer a new haptic Human-Machine Interfaces technology, integrating touch sensing and disruptive feedback capabilities directly into an automotive dashboard.

The objectives are to fabricate these actuators with large area and cost effective printing technologies and to integrate them through plastic moulding injection in a small-scale dashboard prototype. We will design, implement and evaluate new approaches for Human-Computer Interaction on a fully functional prototype that combine in packaging sensor and actuator foils driven by custom electronics, and accessible to end-users via software libraries, allowing for the reproduction of common and accepted sensations such as roughness, vibration and relief.

HAPPINESS is a multi-disciplinary project with partners from industrial and academic research organisations across Europe (Robert BOSCH Gmbh, Walter Pack, Arkema, ISD, CEA, GAIKER and INRIA). Our role at the University of Glasgow is to understand how in-car users and drivers interact with touch-based interfaces and design more effective interaction techniques with haptic feedback capabilities on a touch-surface dashboard derived from the project for driving and in-car situations.

Project website: http://www.happiness-project.eu/

Publications

  •  Shakeri, G.: Multimodal feedback for mid-air gestures when driving. In University of Glasgow, 2020.  Link.
  • Di Campli San Vito P., Brewster S., Pollick F., Brown E., Skypchuk L. and Mouzakitis A.: Haptic Navigation Cues on the Steering Wheel. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ât CHI'19, ACM Press, 2019.  Link.
  • Shakeri, G., Freeman, E., Frier, W., Iodice, M., Long, B., Georgiou, O. and Andersson, C.: Three-in-one: Levitation, Parametric Audio, and Mid-Air Haptic Feedback. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems at CHI'19 Interactivity, ACM Press, 2019.  Link.
  • Shakeri, G., Williamson, J. H. and Brewster, S.: May the Force Be with You: Ultrasound Haptic Feedback for Mid-Air Gesture Interaction in Cars. In Proceedings of the 10th International ACM Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications - AutoUI '18, ACM Press, 2018.
  • Shakeri, G., Williamson, J. H. and Brewster, S.: Bimodal Feedback for In-Car Mid-Air Gesture Interaction. In Proceedings of 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI’17), ACM Press, 2017.
  • Shakeri, G., Williamson, J. H. and Brewster, S.: Novel Multimodal Feedback Techniques for In-Car Mid-AirGesture Interaction. In Proceedings of the 10th International ACM Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications - AutoUI '17, ACM Press, 2017.
  • Freeman, E., Vo, D.-B., Wilson, G., Shakeri, G. and Brewster, S.: Towards Mid-Air Haptic Widgets. In CHI 2016 Workshop on Mid-Air Haptics and Displays: Systems for Un-instrumented Mid-Air Interactions, 2016.  Link.
  • Shakeri, G., Brewster, S., Williamson, J. and Ng, A.: Evaluating Haptic Feedback on a Steering Wheel in a Simulated Driving Scenario. In Proceedings of CHI '16 Extended Abstracts, ACM Press, 2016.
  • Shakeri, G., Ng, A., Williamson, J. & Brewster, S.: Evaluation of Haptic Patterns on a Steering Wheel. In Proceedings of AutomotiveUI '16, ACM Press, 2016.