Getting Insights From Twitter: What People Want to Touch in Daily Life

Understanding what people want to touch in daily life has been one of the central topics in the fields of haptic science, engineering, and marketing. Several studies have addressed the topic, however, their findings were highly dependent on the experimental stimuli in the laboratory environment. In this study, we tried to gain insights into targets that people want to touch in daily life by conducting a Twitter survey. We collected a considerable amount of Japanese Twitter posts containing references to the desire for touch. To capture the motivation underlying these desires in relation to haptic properties, we used several queries that comprehensively covered exploratory procedures. The results showed that targets that people wanted to touch depended on the exploratory procedures in the queries used (e.g., “want to stroke” tended to target people and animals). We also found that these targets were desirable to touch not only for their haptic properties but also as a means of communicating with other people or living animals. Our findings would be important for understanding human haptic function in the real world and for developing consumer haptic displays and applications.