RoboBunting

RoboBunting brings cat-like playfulness to robots through a simple furry paddle that users stroke, scratch, and pet while it gently pushes back in coordinated force exchanges. Inspired by feline behaviour, this minimalist haptic device acts as a lively leader or responsive follower by varying stiffness, motion speed, and timing to evoke social traits like extroversion, liveliness, and aliveness. The work paves the way for companion robots that deepen emotional bonds via natural bilateral touch dynamics, ideal for therapy or reducing isolation.

Affective Haptics Applications

At SPIN, we are designing to apply affective haptic technologies in practice for applications such as facilitating emotion regulation, supporting synchronization during remote work, and many more. 

VibMix

People describe vibrations using emotional descriptions. For example, signals can feel more or less "lively" than others. Can this language be used to stylize vibrations to feel more/less along certain emotional dimensions? 

Voodle

Voodle is an interface that uses vocal input to design haptic behaviour.

HapTurk: Online Crowdsourcing Haptic Feedback

Crowdsourcing can gather rapid feedback at scale, but how do we crowdsource a haptic prototype? Haptic proxies are visualizations and simplified phone vibrations that can be used to represent high-fidelity haptics in studies conducted using Mechanical Turk.

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