Haptic Feedback
(Insert the picture called ‘Haptic Feedback’)
Summary
What if the experience of reading was stored in your memory in such a way that, at will, you could explore that world / topic you were reading in a ‘real’ way. The story starts with a woman reading a book about the deep ocean and suddenly ‘feeling’ she was in the deep…how will she get out…does she want to??
MY upcoming novel, Haptic Feedback is a sequel to Haptic. It was inspired by FeelSleeve, an interface that allows children to feel story events in their hands while they are reading on a mobile device.
Engaging children with traditional approaches in education, especially reading, grows ever more difficult in the face of their attachment to tablets and computer games. We explore the possibility of making the story reading experience more interesting and memorable for children using haptic augmentation. In this paper, we present FeelSleeve, an interface that allows children to feel story events in their hands while they are reading on a mobile device. FeelSleeve uses transducers and audio output from the tablet within a gloved attachment to create vibratory effects that are meaningfully related to story content. We describe a study investigating whether embedding such haptic feedback into stories enhances reading for six to nine-year-olds. Our results indicate that story events accompanied by haptic feedback are better comprehended and appear to be more salient in memory. These results provide evidence that haptic effects have the potential to improve children’s reading experience and make it more memorable.
Rey Drooner 