-- KarlinBark - 15 July 2004
Hm.

Talked with Li yesterday in depth about what we should do next.

Concerns he had were that it wasn't even necessary to complete a magnitude test...most of the communication done in military is binary. Either you are touched or you are not.

We talked with someone at the fire station yesterday (7/14/04) to see if they had any special protocols for when the situation was smoky, and visibility was low. Specifically, we were hoping there would be some sort of protocol that was written down and taught to firefighters that would enlighten us on the different types of touch communication that was being used. We asked a fireman if there was any code or specific situation in which touch communication was used over verbal or visual communication.

He told us there wasn't anything special. No specific protocol that was taught or written in a manual. He stated that if there was a situation in which you could not see or hear another person, it is most likely an intense situation, and the touch between two firefighters is mostly grabbing. For example, you grab the person in front of you to stop them, you grab someone's arm left or right to pull them to a specific direction. No other information is really communicated by touch, at least nothing that the firefighter mentioned. If the smoke is bad enough to make the firefighters crawl on the ground, then they might keep a hand on each other's legs to make sure they are all in the same place, but there isn't anything that is taught in training school.

Much of the touch communication is intuitive- no need to teach someone if someone grabs your arm and pulls you toward the left, you should go left. There isn't anything fancy or high-tech about training firefighters, so it?s not something that is really focused on.

This basically echoes what information we've been getting about the military as well. Rudy Darken says that there isn?t a specific protocol, and that each team in the military has their own unique commands and communication methods.

Much of the touch-communication is very intuitive. For example, if someone grabs my shoulder, I stop, instinctively. If someone grabs my arm and moves it to the left, then I would move my body to the left. There doesn?t seem to be much in the area of 'touch codes' or anything.

Li and I are wondering if it is even worth it to add magnitude or directionality in the haptic response.

Perhaps a more compelling discussion would be whether or not skin stretch/dc response is better than vibratory response?

Human to human touch contact is not a widely used application- (firefighters, military)- touch communication is usually really intuitive, so we think it might not be necessary to trained.

Maybe we should not concentrate on human to human communication in a virtual environment, but something more general, like the Half Life

Paper says that people can distinguish different magnitudes of tangential force on their fingerpad, but we don't believe it. We don't understand exactly how the experiment was conducted-

Should we complete a precise test of magnitude? Or just a rough test to get an idea?

Should we design a device to provide both vibration and skin stretch? Should we complete a comparison test, comparing vibration effects to skin stretching effects?