Bits and pieces of July 2011

The Art & Science of Touch
In this video, artist and jewelry designer Farah Bandookwala uses Haptics (via Cloud 9, a 3D touch-modeling software) to design her works. It is not the first I hear about the Cloud 9 software, I should try it out with my Falcon eventually. [via Ponoko]

Artificial Muscle: Designing for Haptics, link
Kicker Studio, published a small case study about work exploring haptics. After reading the article, I find it a bit superficial. It is mostly about enhancing UX touchscreen products with vibrotactile feedback. The thing I appreciate the most with the write-up is the importance of building prototypes to feel haptics during the design work. As I’ve been finding myself, haptics is best multimodal (haptic + sound effect = believability) and the timing is crucial to get things right.

Immersion’s Haptic Design Guidelines, link
I have been exploring and playing a bit with Immersion’s new SDK for Android called MOTIV. I appreciated the Universal Haptic Layer (UHL) available as a list of 100+ predefined haptic effects. I tried it on my HTC Nexus One, and it is a bit disappointing, it is mostly buzzing differently. I guess some new phone hardwares with LRA or piezo actuators provide enhanced haptic rendering capabilities. Immersion is providing a few guidelines for designing haptic effects, with good insights about timing and considerations for various type of actuators. I’ll definetely continue exploring MOTIV Studio, their development tool to draw and build haptic effects.

Four Stages of Competence
I am trying to dig into a bit of psychology these days to mostly learn about learning processes and learning styles. Only key model that I recently found is the “conscious competence” learning model [wikipedia]. It has four main stages: Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence and Unconscious Competence. There is often a fifth stage added to the model. The best resource for introducing and explaining it this page at Businessballs.