Featured Article from the July-September Issue

Putting Haptics into the Ambience

By Karon E. MacLean

In an attentionally overloaded world, relief will come only from interfaces between humans and computation that are able to provide information in the background of our sensory and cognitive processes. Haptic displays may have a special role to play in this emerging movement toward ambient interfaces, because the touch sense is well suited to present many types of information in a way that treads lightly on our mental resources. This paper offers an introduction to the notion of ambient information display, and explores why and how the haptic channel could contribute.

View the PDF of this article       View this issue in the digital library