HapTable: Yüzey el hareketleri için gerçek-zamanlı dokunsal geribildirim sağlayan etkileşimli masa

This dissertation aims to present a multitouch interaction surface to enable a more natural human-computer interaction. Within the last decade, touch screens largely replaced indirect input devices, and became widely integrated in our daily tasks. As user interactions moved from mechanical controls to touch controls, the performance and accuracy of users dropped due to the lack of tactile feedback. In mechanical controls, users continuously receive tactile information according to the stage of their interaction. Therefore, we suggest that adding haptic modality suitable for the interaction to current touch systems could potentially improve task performance. Touch screens currently only use visual modality to provide information to users. In this case, we suggest that haptic systems could be used to provide additional information to users, and help to relieve visual information overload. We explored how we can augment current touchscreen based systems using haptic modality without compromising direct manipulation. For this purpose, we designed and manufactured HapTable -a large multimodal interactive tabletop. HapTable allows users to interact with digital content through natural touch gestures, and to receive visual and haptic feedback according to their interaction. HapTable first recognizes the gesture performed by the user. To provide suitable haptic feedback, it combines two different haptic technologies -piezoelectric actuator-based vibration in normal direction and electrostatic-based frictional vibration in tangential direction. We explored the first actuation technology to provide additional information on touch surfaces, such as a directional wind flow. Our findings indicate that users successfully recognized the direction of flow between two fingers, as well as under their palm. The latter actuation technology is used to provide tactility while turning a visual knob. Although the quantitative metrics did not show improvement in task performance with haptic feedback, the qualitative metrics showed that users strongly preferred knobs with haptic feedback over the purely visual knob.