Test..

Group Members: Ahmed, Karthik, Kattie ---- In my last project iteration blog , I noted that our team focused too much on trying to represent our bar chart data haptically, and not as much on utilizing the modality itself to enrich the visualization experience such that part of the user experience would be lost without the haptics. We kept that point in mind for the second iteration, even though we weren't initially clear on our objective. I luckily received my Haply just a couple of days after the first iteration; this gave me the chance to work on force-feedback for this iteration. Assembling the Haply wasn't too problematic once I realized that using my own screwdriver set helped more with the screws than using the Allen key that came with the package. I somehow managed to snap one of the motor wires, but rejoining it fortunately wasn't a problem. Altogether, assembly took approximately an hour and a half. Fixing a snapped motor wire during assembly.. yikes. After trying

Project Goal: To visualize data using the Haply and vibrotactile devices and help answer questions such as “which type of feedback is more suitable for a specific type of visualization?” and “what are some of the ways in which haptics can complement the visualization experience?” Iteration 1 Approach:  Given the circumstances with three out of four of us having different hardware, we took a more experimental based approach: we shared code for developing graphs, tested out various encoding mechanisms using the tactile devices, reported on what we felt, shared our experiences, and then decided on how to go about the next iteration. The first step was to develop simple, common visualizations on which we could compare our haptic experiences. A quick search on Google led me to find a visualization API for Processing developed by an academic team at the City University London. As you can see, this gives us a wide variety of visualizations to test out work on: Of course, this is much mo