The Role of Prototyping Tools for Haptic Behavior Design

We describe key affordances required by tools for developing haptic behaviors. Haptic icon design involves the envisioning, expression and iterative modification of haptic behavior representations. These behaviors are then rendered on a haptic device. For example, a sinusoidal force vs. position representation rendered on a haptic knob would produce the feeling of detents. Our contribution is twofold. We introduce a custom haptic icon prototyper that includes novel interaction features, and we then use the lessons learnt from its development plus our experiences with a variety of haptic devices to present and argue high-level design choices for such prototyping tools in general.