Exploring Extended Mind-Wandering Through an Interactive Haptic Fidget Object

Mind-wandering (MW) and fidgeting are both present as pervasive phenomena in everyday life and can positively impact ideation. Importantly, within the MW experience, MW can manifest in bodily behaviors such as physical fidgeting. Here, we use an extended mind framework to consider fidgeting as a case of extended MW, where (part of) a MW episode...

BreatheWithMe: Exploring Visual and Vibrotactile Displays for Social Breath Awareness during Colocated, Collaborative Tasks

Sharing breathing signals has the capacity to provide insights into hidden experiences and enhance interpersonal communication. However, it remains unclear how the modality of breath signals (visual, haptic) is socially interpreted during collaborative tasks. In this mixed-methods study, we design and evaluate BreatheWithMe, a prototype for...

An Overview of Wearable Haptic Technologies and Their Performance in Virtual Object Exploration

We often interact with our environment through manual handling of objects and exploration of their properties. Object properties (OP), such as texture, stiffness, size, shape, temperature, weight, and orientation provide necessary information to successfully perform interactions. The human haptic perception system plays a key role in this. As...

An Interaction Theory Account of (Mediated) Social Touch

Research on mediated social touch (MST) has, either implicitly or explicitly, built on theoretical assumptions regarding social interactions that align with “theory theory” or “simulation theory” of social cognition. However, these approaches struggle to explain MST interactions that occur outside of a laboratory setting. I briefly discuss these...

Co-operation and haptic assistance for tele-manipulated control over two asymmetric slaves

The success of future fusion power plants as a sustainable energy source greatly depends on their uptime. This uptime relies on the plant's maintenance, which must be performed via tele-manipulation. Tele-manipulated maintenance is challenging, as exemplified by strictly selected and highly trained operators who still require more time to work...