Haptically Annotated Movies: Reaching Out and Touching the Silver Screen

The film industry consistently strives to make the movie-going experience more immersive and more captivating, through larger screens, higher-quality images, and increasingly sophisticated speaker systems. Currently, however, presentation of movies is limited to the visual and auditory senses. Haptics provides significant potential for augmenting the theater experience beyond those sensory modalities. In this paper and the accompanying demo, we present a system for recording and annotating haptic information that is time-referenced to a movie, then replaying the recorded haptic information to a user. We discuss several user interface issues that we addressed and several scenarios that are augmented by this system.