Towards Mid-Air Haptic Widgets

Introduction Mid-air haptic technology has created new possibilities for in-air interaction, allowing users to experience rich haptic sensations without touching or wearing a tactile display. This means we can enhance mid-air interfaces with haptic feedback, potentially improving their usability as users feel cues that help them provide input. As interaction designers, we are faced with an exciting but little-explored design space, which needs to be better understood so that we can create effective cues for mid-air interfaces and their widgets. In this paper, we summarise research at the University of Glasgow into ultrasound haptics, focusing on how our research informs the effective design of mid-air haptic widgets. We then identify future work which will advance our understanding of how we can use mid-air haptics to improve the design of such interfaces.