PhD Proposal: Toward a Haptic Codec: Composing Perceptual Mechanisms Into a Programmable Haptic Medium

Haptic feedback plays an important role in creating immersive and engaging experiences, and research has explored an expanding range of sensations. Yet haptic effects remain closely tied to the devices that render them. This dependence limits their reuse across hardware and makes it difficult to scale systems that support diverse haptic outputs. Image and audio technologies benefit from shared representations that separate content from playback hardware. Haptics still lacks a comparable representation grounded in perception, one that could support the specification and recomposition of haptic effects across devices. My research explores the foundations of a haptic codec: a shared representation based on a compact set of physical primitives, together with perceptual rendering rules that determine how those primitives are organized in space and time.
I explore force, temperature, skin stretch, and vibration as candidate physical primitives, with particular attention to the perceptual mechanisms that shape the sensations they produce. JetUnit serves as an initial case study, showing how force, treated as a single physical primitive, can generate a range of tactile effects when its magnitude and temporal profile are controlled precisely. In TherMosaic, spatial summation and thermal adaptation are used to accelerate perceived temperature transitions without increasing the actuator’s rate of physical temperature change. Ongoing work on PathStretch is investigating how continuous skin-stretch sensations can be reconstructed from discrete, precisely controlled physical inputs. Together, these projects characterize perceptual mappings within individual stimulus dimensions.
The next stage of the research examines whether these mappings remain predictable when multiple primitives are composed. I propose the Haptic Texel, a compact multimodal unit that integrates force, stretch, vibration, and temperature. It will serve as an experimental platform for measuring cross-primitive interference and testing whether rendering rules established within one stimulus dimension remain valid when combined with others. The platform will also support the study of how separate physical signals are perceptually bound into coherent haptic events.
The broader goal is to establish the perceptual and representational foundations of a programmable haptic medium. In this framework, physical primitives provide the basis for specifying haptic content, while spatial and temporal parameters determine how that content is organized. Perceptual rendering rules link physical inputs to experienced sensations, and composition constraints define the conditions under which those rules continue to hold. Such a representation could make haptic effects easier to adapt and reuse across different rendering systems.