HITPROTO: a tool for the rapid prototyping of haptic interactions for haptic data visualization

The use of haptic devices is becoming widespread, particularly with their growth in the home-games market and on mobile phones. Likewise, the number of haptic devices and APIs is increasing. However, it is still difficult to program and develop haptic applications. Consequently, there is a need to hide the complexity of programming a haptic application or interactions by providing prototyping tools or frameworks. In particular, one growing application area is haptic data visualization (also called haptification): the use of haptic devices to represent and realize information and data. This paper presents a visual prototyping tool for haptic interactions for data visualization. Users can easily and quickly create haptic interactions through a visual programming interface with tunable parameters. This paper also presents a user evaluation aimed at demonstrating that non-programmers can create simple haptic interactions and which also indicates potential improvements to the tool.