Today a variety of platforms are available for sharing digital content, but most of these platforms only support audio/visual information. Although this helps us share our ideas and stories easily but sometimes it is difficult to share the complete emotion. For example, it is difficult to explain how feathers of a penguin feel like, are they hard? soft? how soft? or on a bakery blog, it is difficult to explain the exact consistence of the dough, for the user to make a good cake. These feeling can better be explained by providing tacile information to the user.This project aims at providing this tacile information. I am building a tacile display using magnetic material whos visosity and hardness could be altered by a variable magnetic field. Information would be projected on this material and its hardness would be matched to the content.

 

Future Work: The current version of the interface is able to emulate materials like Honey, Cheese, Soft wood close to the original but for some materials, more work needs to put in. Also the interface can be modified to be able to emulate surface textures as well eg: rough, smooth etc.

 

Tags: HCI, Tangible Interfaces