Haptic Tools: Enhancing Tool Capabilities by Tactile-kinesthetic Feedback

Adding tactile-kinesthetic feedback to tools is a novel concept that aims at creating physically computable tools, either augmented ones or virtual ones that act as controllers, which makes tool usage feeling realistic and enables rich user experience (UX). We extend existing approaches of haptics in digital object manipulation, such as vibrotactile and pseudo-haptic feedback, through integrating tactile-kinethics. When using traditional tools, such as saw, hammer, and drilling machine, we feel rich haptic feedback, such as weight change, force feedback, and tactile-kinethetic feedback. Such feedback not only provides information about the position of our tools and the progress of the work we do with them, it also constrains or even stops the movements of the tools we hold in hand. In this position paper, we point at limitations in realism and UX of haptic feedback during object manipulation and tool usage. We discuss how to possibly extend capabilities of future tool with a focus of adding haptic feedback that makes digital tool use feel "real". We finally highlight challenges we expect to face during our project.The HapticIO research project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) of Germany under grant number 16SV8758