The Haptic Experience (HX) Lab at the University of Waterloo is group of researchers combining the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Haptics. Haptic technology engages the sense of touch by providing physical feedback to users.
Our lab focuses on what we call HX Research. We study the design, study, and evaluation of complete haptic systems, with a drive towards studying these systems in-depth and at scale. As part of this work, we build software and conceptual tools for HX design and research to enable anyone, anywhere to be able to work with haptic technology just like it's other media. Without these tools, haptic technology will be limited to small, in-lab studies and slow deployment into commercial applications, and haptics will provide benefits for a select few. Our long-term goal is a suite of haptic computing tools to assist the creation, deployment, and study of haptic technology, which we will use to conduct cutting-edge research into haptics.
We are highly interdisciplinary spanning Faculties across the university, from Engineering to Arts.
News
TOCHI paper accepted!
Congratulations to Tor-Salve Dalsgaard on his accepted paper titled "A Unified Model for Haptic Experience" by Tor-Salve Dalsgaard and Oliver Schneider.
Tor-Salve will present his work at ACM CHI 2025 in Yokohama. See you there!
Visiting Researcher: Margot Racat
We were thrilled to host Prof. Margot Racat at the HX Lab last week! Prof. Racat presented on her work involving haptics in consumer contexts and chatted with us about how we can further understand and support the experience of haptics. Find out more at her lab's page: https://www.ecoles-idrac.com/recherche/idrac-research-lab
HXLab at CHI '23
Oliver Schneider will be at CHI '23 to present Factors of Haptic Experience across Multiple Haptic Modalities by Ahmed Anwar, Tianzheng Shi, and Oliver Schneider. See you in Hamburg!
If you missed the talk, you can catch a recording here.