Printgets: an Open-Source Toolbox for Designing Vibrotactile Widgets with Industrial-Grade Printed Actuators and Sensors

Christian Frisson (1, 2, 3) , Julien Decaudin (3, 4) , Mario Sanz Lopez (5) , Thomas Pietrzak (3, 6, 7)

1 IDMIL - Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory
2 McGill University = Université McGill [Montréal, Canada]
3 LOKI - Technology and knowledge for interaction
4 STIP - Service transfert pour l'innovation et partenariats
5 DEFROST - Deformable Robots Simulation Team
6 CRIStAL - Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille - UMR 9189
7 Université de Lille

New technologies for printing sensors and actuators combine the flexibility of interface layouts of touchscreens with localized vibrotactile feedback, but their fabrication still requires industrial-grade facilities. Until these technologies become easily replicable, interaction designers need material for ideation. We propose an open-source hardware and software toolbox providing maker-grade tools for iterative design of vibrotactile widgets with industrial-grade printed sensors and actuators. Our hardware toolbox provides a mechanical structure to clamp and stretch printed sheets, and electronic boards to drive sensors and actuators. Our software toolbox expands the design space of haptic interaction techniques by reusing the wide palette of available audio processing algorithms to generate real-time vibrotactile signals. We validate our toolbox with the implementation of three exemplar interface elements with tactile feedback: buttons, sliders, touchpads.

Mots clés: Haptic; Interactive device; Haptic device; Vibrotactile Device; Printed actuators; Haptic widgets; Human - Computer Interaction

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Christian Frisson, Julien Decaudin, Mario Sanz Lopez, Thomas Pietrzak. Printgets: an Open-Source Toolbox for Designing Vibrotactile Widgets with Industrial-Grade Printed Actuators and Sensors. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design (HAID 2020), Aug 2020, Montreal, Canada. ⟨hal-02901202v2⟩