Exploring Language with a Haptic Door Knob

As part of an ongoing exploration in using the haptic (touch sense) medium to enhance interaction with embedded computation and render it more expressive, we built Aladdin, a door with a haptically active knob. We chose a door as the basis of this work for its quality of mediating a real social threshold and for being a commonplace manual control which provokes a range of expectations. The haptic display combined torque and thermal outputs, and we used it in intimate relation with an auditory display in order to extend its expressive range. We used Aladdin to implement a set of narratives that developed its possibilities; and during this process, postulated a framework to describe a haptic language and used it as tool to design and discover haptic experiences.