News from the Field: Coders and the Creative Unite to Design and Build Apps for Surface Haptics

THE first haptics hackathon—Hapticathon—took place in Poznan, Poland this month. The event was organized by S»awa Madelska from an eCommerce agency, White Ducky, in cooperation with a software house, Programa.pl. Eight interdisciplinary teams consisting of 40 participants rose to the challenge and spent 24 hours developing their apps for the TPad, a surface haptics display. The event began with an inspirational keynote presentation of world trends in haptics followed by a technical specification of the surface haptics features of the TPad. Afterwards, teams worked intensively during an ideation session and used the value proposition canvas model to finally arrive at one main idea for their project. After receiving feedback from mentors, the teams were ready to begin and started coding and preparing their pitches. Later that day, Joe Mullenbach from Tangible Haptics, the co-creator of TPad, joined the event via a skype call and answered questions concerning the participants’ projects.