"EVOKHAPTICS: UN APPROCCIO CROSS-MODALE PER EVOCARE PROPRIETÀ DI TESSUTI SU INTERFACCE INTERATTIVE DIGITALI"

Nowadays, digital retail experiences lack of multisensory feedback necessary to assess product properties. Thus, this research develops a cross-modal approach called “EvokHaptics” by exploiting two human senses (i.e., vision and hearing), in order to evoke the actual tactile feedback related to the material properties. The proposed approach focuses on the design of a digital interactive interface for hand-held devices. While users touch the displayed fabric, the computer-generated image is deformed according to the mechanical property of the fabric, depending on the gesture applied and generating a visual feedback. Additionally, audio feedback is synthetized in real-time to simulate two specific properties, i.e. softness and roughness. Evocative sounds belong to natural contexts were used in order to convey different degrees of softness and roughness, in combination to the visual fabric deformation. A psychophysical experiment has been conducted to verify the approach. The results obtained through the ANOVA test show that evocative sound associated to visual deformation of digital fabrics affects significantly the perceived softness and roughness. In addition, it has been demonstrated that different time durations of evocative sound can transmit different degrees of softness and different levels of volume of evocative sound can transmit different degrees of roughness. After a series of testing, the final objective is to integrate this method in fashion retail e-commerce and online sites by expanding the customer shopping experience.