With haptics now common in consumer devices, diversity in tactile perception and aesthetic preferences confound haptic designers. End-user customization out of example sets is an obvious solution, but haptic collections are notoriously difficult to explore. This work addresses the provision of easy and highly navigable access to large, diverse sets of vibrotactile stimuli, on the premise that multiple access pathways facilitate discovery and engagement. We propose and examine five disparate organization schemes (taxonomies), describe how we created a 120-item library with diverse functional and affective characteristics, and present VibViz, an interactive tool for enduser library navigation and our own investigation of how different taxonomies can assist navigation. An exploratory user study with and of VibViz suggests that most users gravitate towards an organization based on sensory and emotional terms, but also exposes rich variations in their navigation patterns and insights into the basis of effective haptic library navigation.

Affective response may dominate users' reactions to the synthesized tactile sensations that are proliferating in today's handheld and gaming devices, yet it is largely unmeasured, modeled or characterized. A better understanding of user perception will aid the design of tactile behavior that engages touch, with an experience that satisfies rather than intrudes. We measured 30 subjects' affective response to vibrations varying in rhythm and frequency, then examined how differences in demographic, everyday use of touch, and tactile processing abilities contribute to variations in affective response. To this end, we developed five affective and sensory rating scales and two tactile performance tasks, and also employed a published 'Need for Touch' (NFT) questionnaire. Subjects' ratings, aggregated, showed significant correlations among the five scales and significant effect of the signal content (rhythm and frequency). Ratings varied considerably among subjects, but this variation did not coincide with demographic, NFT score or tactile task performance. The linkages found among the rating scales confirm this as a promising approach. The next step towards a comprehensive picture of individuals' patterns of affective response to tactile sensations entails pruning, integration and redundancy reduction of these scales, then their formal validation.

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Figure 1: Features of the Locomotion Vault interactive database and visualization include: fltering by attributes (left image), an animated gallery with individual technique descriptions for over 100 locomotion techniques (middle), and two similarity graphs that are expert-created or calculated from the attributes (right).

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