Shared expectations of soft haptic feedback through imagined high-fives with robots and non-human animals at a science festival

Imagine a community that does not only exist of humans but also has animals and robots as equal partners. How do we imagine physical interactions with others in such a community will feel? In this paper, we describe an experiment in which 172 participants designed haptic cues related to 13 presented images of a non-human animal or robot. We designed the experiment as an interactive experience at a science festival, where we used soft robotic haptic displays to present haptic cues. The results show that within the presented parameter space, the design choices of the participants were consistent, with clear differences between most of the images. For example, the haptic cue chosen for the elephant was very different from that of the spider. More specifically, we observe that haptic cue frequency and pressure are both correlated with haptic cue area, where larger cue size is associated with lower frequency and higher pressure. Overall, the results of the experiment demonstrate the potential of a large soft robotic haptic display as a versatile interface for human-machine interaction, and of our interactive experiment design as a tool for haptic cue classification by probing shared expectations among human participants.