Mid-air buttons are currently slow and error-prone. One reason is that their haptic feedback are attempts at replicating physical button feedback instead of being designed specifically for interaction in mid air. We present an approach to haptics for mid-air buttons that extends the feedback beyond the fingertip. Our approach is inspired by recent findings that show how skin vibrations from fingertip presses extend to the whole hand. We apply the haptic feedback across the whole hand to simulate the pull-up effect that triggers users to withdraw their finger upon button activation. We conduct a user study with two tasks to evaluate the whole-hand feedback and compare it with prior work. Our results show that the whole-hand haptic feedback reduces the overall button press duration and allows for more successful button activations compared to the localized haptic feedback. We discuss the reasons behind the improved performance and further steps to improve mid-air presses.

A set of demonstrators of contactless haptic principles is described in this work. The technologies are based on electrostatic piloerection, chemical compounds and ultrasound. Additionally, applications related to affective touch are presented, ranging from storytelling to biosignal transfer, accompanied with a simple application to edit dynamic tactile patterns in an easy way. The demonstrators are the result of the Touchless project, which is a H2020 european collaborative project that integrates 3 universities and 3 companies. These demostrators are contactless haptic experiences and thus facilitate the come-and-interact paradigm, where users can approach the demo booth and directly experience the applications without having to wear devices, making the experience fast and hygienic.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Haptic devices.

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Figure 1: Example of touchless social interaction. People can feel each other remotely, convey emotions through tactile communication and interact with systems without touching any surface physically.