VibroPlay: Authoring Three-Dimensional Spatial-Temporal Tactile Effects with Direct Manipulation

Vibrotactile patterns can enhance the immersion of multimedia contents such as videos or games. To produce the patterns, several GUI-based author-ing systems are proposed by deriving from the applications of signal process-ing or animation authoring. Although these systems are powerful, most of them focused on designing two-dimensional tactile effects and require pro-fessional domain knowledge. This paper introduces VibroPlay, a VR-based authoring system aiming at enabling users to design three-dimensional spatial-temporal vibrotactile pat-terns for actuator arrays with bare hands or physical artifacts. In the VR environment, the system shows an avatar of the user, virtual replicas of the actuators, and virtual objects that are digitized from the physical artifacts through a depth camera . Once a virtual actuator collided by the virtual ob-jects or hands, the corresponding physical actuator vibrates. Through this manner, users can produce desired patterns by direct manipulation, like act-ing a play. Our explorative study showed that VibroPlay helps users rapidly generate and refine desired patterns after a short training session. Based on the results, the possible extension designs are also discussed. We finally sug-gest that VibroPlay is a learnable, playable, and potential authoring system for designing vibrotactile patterns.