Haptics Club Blog is live, come meet the team.
The author, inspecting an unconventional haptic display prototype while at LoveHoneyGroup.
Welcome.
Welcome to the inaugural post of our new Haptics Club Blog. We’re excited to have you here. Our goal is to bring you various perspectives on haptics in a short format, with a series of both regular and contributing authors. I’m Dan Shor, one of the co-editors-in-chief.
When the Haptics Club crew first approached me with the chance to run the blog, I didn’t know what to say. Haptics is a large discipline with many facets and unique perspectives, and I didn’t know where to begin. I was quickly reminded by Eric Vezzoli that “the hard part is usually getting you to STOP talking about haptics, not to start,” and he’s right. Haptics has been my life for the last half-decade — a calling I’ve accidentally stumbled into and never quite managed to get back out of.
About Me.
Whose hands have the team entrusted this blog? I’ve had the distinct pleasure of exploring haptics through lots of lenses, first learning psychophysics as a student researcher; then tackling VR/AR as Director of Haptics and Research at SenseGlove, before moving on to SexTech as an R&D Mechanical Engineer at LoveHoney Group, and finally as a freelance researcher and consultant at my own firm, Contaxtual Labs. I’m also a professor and academic researcher, teaching a new generation of designers the basics of haptic design and interaction through my lecturer privileges at some of Europe’s premier design engineering faculties.
What’s fascinated me about this field has been the intersectional nature of it all. Haptics conferences are always a mixed bag of neuroscientists, roboticists, engineers, and increasingly creatives — artists and designers. I’ll do my best to curate content from across these disciplines and to find a way to appeal to all these different groups.
Our Content.
The Haptics Club Blog will have a regular series and visiting thoughts. Our regular series will come from the blog’s editors, each of whom will be responsible for a monthly piece. We’ll be announcing the other co-editor and other features very soon.
Fortunately, I can already introduce the first series, mine, entitled Rules for Haptic Design. Each month, I’ll introduce design principles for the successful implementation of haptics —Giving examples and explaining some of the science that underpins the rule. I’ll be pulling straight from lectures, research, and my own take on haptics. My hope is to help anyone new in our community and so they can avoid committing the mistakes I made when starting out.
Our second format is visiting thoughts, which aims to bring awareness to the cutting edge of our discipline, introducing thought leaders, their work, and lessons learned.
Finally, this blog doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We’re here to support and be supported by our Haptics Club Podcast team. We’ll be sharing their thought-provoking interviews as AI-generated (human-edited) transcripts. We’re already working our way through the back catalog, and hope you’ll enjoy re-experiencing your favorite episode in written form.
The haptics tent is growing and changing. The advent of the touchscreen as the default interface to the digital world has shifted the haptic conversation. The increased demand for tactile digitalism driven by VR/AR will reinfuse our ranks yet again. We hope to give you the information, insights, and opinions needed to navigate haptics.
Join Us.
Haptics Club is our campfire — a place where our community can come together and swap stories. With our Podcasts, Discord Server, and now Blog, our mission is to help share and learn from the experiences of those who came before; and have our assumptions challenged by those who come after. I’m honored to help curate our written conversations, and I look forward to sharing more with you. You can reach out to us here (Haptics.Club.Community at gmail dot com) and on the Haptics Club Discord Server.
With that, welcome aboard and stay tuned for more!
-Dan Shor
Co-Editor in Chief
Haptics Club Blog
