Audio to Haptic interaction design with ForceHost and Feelix supporting DeformableHapticSurfaces

Haptics, as a multidisciplinary field, has applications within the Medical, Consumer and Entertainment domains, to name a few, and despite their widespread presence in our phones to provide the user with a vibrotactile feedback response (a subset of haptics), haptics have very minimally been explored by artists as a tool for authoring immersive arts. The proposed project aims to create low-cost affordable haptic devices with one or mutliple degrees of freedom and authoring tools for artists to implement into their artwork immersive haptics and interactive audio. In the near future, artists can then use the proposed toolkit to benefit from Haptic floors being deployed into immersive art spaces like the Dome at SAT. The authoring tools Feelix, a ”haptic authoring tool developed to support the design and integration of force feedback and shape change in user interfaces”, and ForceHost, a toolchain that uses the functional sound synthesis and processing programming language FAUST that compiles firmware for audio-haptic applications, will be extended for use with the DeformableHapticSurfaces, a work-in-progress and open-source toolkit for interactive multi-linear DoF deformable surfaces, to create and demo the proposed immersive haptic and audio interaction toolkit. Support for audio input will also be added into Feelix potentially with ForceHost as an input modality so that ForceHost developed tools can interface their audio with the Haptic floor.