Designing for Accessibility: How a Graduate Student Makes Haptics Research Accessible

Ana Lucia began her master’s in May of 2021, still deep into the COVID-19 pandemic when the University of Waterloo was struggling with an entirely virtual educational experience. She was supervised by Dr. Oliver Schneider (Management Science and Engineering), and was a member of his Haptics Experience (HX) Lab, one of the in-house labs at the GI. At the time she was still in her home country of Mexico, but she had plans of moving to Canada to continue her education once the pandemic restrictions were lifted. Her only knowledge of the GI was filtered through the perspective of other HX Lab members during online meetings.

What Ana Lucia loved most about the GI, when she arrived, was the carefully curated layout of the facility design to support interdisciplinary research, numerous labs, serendipitous conversations, collaboration, and a variety of equipment. The HX Lab encourages students to experiment through research creation. Here they can build, tinker, and 3D print to produce physical prototypes of their research. As Ana Lucia was working in haptics, this space provided invaluable opportunities for her research.

“What I loved about it was having such a big network of people you can always ask for advice or help with your research,” she said, recalling being pulled in as a subject matter expert on multiple occasions for different projects and helping people from other disciplines with their study designs.

“From what I’ve seen at other spaces it’s very one sided. People at the GI are very open to help you out. It’s a nice community.”

GI members are encouraged to not only participate in interdisciplinary research, but also in cross-cultural exchanges. Ana Lucia connected with Marco Moran-Ledesma (Systems Design Engineering) and Dr. Hector Perez (A), a postdoc at the time (both also originally from Mexico), to collaborate in building an altar for Dia de las Muertos (Day of the Dead) within the GI as a way to celebrate this significant holiday while far from home. They encouraged other GI members to participate and were pleasantly surprised with how quickly the altar filled up.

“It was really nice to be embraced for our culture,” she said. “Now that it keeps happening every year and that people have continued the tradition at the GI, each year it just gets better.”

This has been a consistent theme of Ana Lucia’s journey at the GI. She has often found herself building systems from the ground up, creating guidelines for others to use in the future so they aren’t also starting from scratch. Her master’s thesis Tickle Trunk: a Toolkit for Communication and Brainstorming Between Hapticians and Non-Hapticians does just this.

Ana Lucia's thesis comes out of a need to better communicate what haptics is as a fledgling research field. Having emerged out of disability studies, haptics uses physical feedback in technology, like vibrations in cellphones or game controllers, to create meaning. As with most research, people outside of the discipline find it hard to understand. One of the core concepts that emerged from Ana Lucia’s thesis was that people need to actually experience haptic technology to better understand it. Once they understand the enhanced immersive experience that haptics creates, they can see how its application makes things, such as interactive exhibits, more accessible and dynamic.

In being supported by the GI and its facilities, Ana Lucia was able to run participant studies and work with people directly to receive critical feedback on haptic technologies from non-hapticians. This is what formed the backbone of her master’s thesis, and the prototype development of the toolkit itself called the Tickle Trunk. With the HX Lab’s 3D printer, Ana Lucia designed and printed input sensors that users would interact with by touching, twisting, or shaking. The sensors were connected to ‘output actuators’ that were controlled by the input sensors and delivered a physical sensation like a gust of wind through a fan, a feeling of warmth, or an additional texture change.

In being able to play with the toolkit and experience haptic technology, Ana Lucia’s research became an important part of a much larger interdisciplinary research project. Her supervisor, Dr. Schneider, brought Ana Lucia onto the project Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR). DOHR is an interdisciplinary virtual reality (VR) experience involving different disciplines like history, communication, engineering, education, law, game design, theatre. The team also worked closely with survivors and victim advocates.

Another important facet of DOHR is also the sensitive nature of the research itself in how it approaches testimonies regarding experiences in the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children (NSHCC). Former residents share their testimonies, and with such a large and diverse team, it was important that everyone understood the technology and methods used in designing a VR experience. Especially as the purpose of DOHR is to educate high school students on the history of the NSHCC and its surviving impact.

When presented with this opportunity, Ana Lucia had project members and former residents of the NSHCC interact with the Tickle Trunk to provide them with an understanding of what haptics is and what it is capable of. It showed to them how these sorts of technologies can be incorporated into VR experiences and be used in ways that are specifically geared towards matters of social justice, highlighting the voices of marginalized communities.

This is only one part of what the Tickle Trunk is capable of when introducing people to haptics, and Ana Lucia hopes it will continue to broaden people’s understanding of this field of study. As she leaves the GI to focus on her career within industry, her legacy is a comprehensive toolkit that will continue to inform future hapticians and non-hapticians on the accessibility and novelty of haptic tools.

If you'd like to stay up to date with Ana Lucia's work, follow her on LinkedIn.