Conveying Sense of Force Explicitly: Designing Future E-Reading Systems to Support Subjective Knowledge Sharing

In the shift from UGC (User-Generated Content) to PGC (Professionally-Generated Content) for online content production, we will see more formal knowledge sharing in the formats of textbooks and user manuals. This asks us to design better technical reading systems to better support social knowledge sharing. In this workshop presentation, I want to discuss our current studies and future work on how to use attached haptic devices to support knowledge sharing in the case of future e-textbooks. Our thought for supporting written or verbal explanations of human sensing of force is as follows. Because written or verbal explanation about sense of force is personal and subjective, when same stimulus is presented to different persons, their explanations about how they feel could be different. Therefore, a practical method is to use a system to pass the same stimulus, so that the receiving people can feel them firsthand and understand the correspondent explanation explicitly