In a broad sense, “haptics” refers to the feeling of touch. It could be a simple vibration feedback from any human-machine interface, like a smartphone, to recreating surfaces and textures on a tablet screen.
Haptics is used to deliver messages to a user through the sense of touch. As humans, we have five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. The former three senses help us understand our immediate environment.
Let’s consider an example where a person is watching a video with his headphones on, and we want to get his attention. Any audio alerts may not be heard, so we might tap on his shoulder instead. This is a real-world example where we make use of the touch sense, when the auditory and visual senses are otherwise engaged. Similarly, when a person is driving a car, his visual and auditory senses are focused on driving safely. Appealing to one of the driver’s other senses could help convey information more effectively. The use of tactile feedback in touch-based consoles has been shown to help reduce the frequency that drivers glance away from the road, by giving drivers assuring feedback through a “button press” haptic effect when a selection is made on the center console.
Other uses for haptics include wearable applications, where haptics could do things like deliver tactile messages to a jogger who receives an alert with every mile covered without disrupting music or to someone sleeping as an alarm that ticks gently at the start of the day to provide an alternative to a blaring alarm clock. These types of haptic alerts are very personal. Only the user wearing the haptic-enabled device will be notified, not everybody in hearing or visual range, as with other types of alerts.
TI recently announced a kit that allows users to customize haptic patterns from an iOS device and stream tactile vibration patterns over Bluetooth® Low Energy to the DRV2605 haptic actuator driver.
This Haptic Bluetooth Kit is primarily targeted for evaluating haptics in form-factor haptics, like body-worn wearables, smart gadgets around the house, and more interestingly, in prototyping systems where having long wires from an external controller is undesirable.
The kit features a DRV2605EVM-BT printed circuit board, which can be used with a free app to prototype eccentric rotating mass (ERM) motor and linear resonant actuator (LRA) haptic effects.
Here’s what you can expect when experimenting with the kit and corresponding app:
From the haptics menu, you’ll have a choice of many different options, which all allow you to customize your haptics experience:
- Stock Waveforms: Allows the designer play a select few waveforms from the ROM library of the DRV2605.
- Your Waveforms: Your patterns customized in the waveform sequencer are located here.
- Waveform Sequencer: Allows the designer to create and save customizable alerts for different use cases.
- Notification Demo: Demonstrates the real-world application of haptics in a system.
- LED Playground: Allows the designer to create a frame-by-frame LED movie that could be used as an alert pattern.
- Register Control: Gives the designer lower-level access to the DRV2605 registers to change modes or behavior of the smart driver.
The kit allows designers to quickly prototype haptic and visual effects on their end application, right out of the box. Complete control of the DRV2605 chip is facilitated through the iOS app. Although haptic feedback has been used in many handheld consumer applications, the possibilities and advantages are endless for bringing tactile feedback to other applications.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll create. Visit our haptics forum and post your question to continue the conversation about tactile feedback.