CollabJam: Studying Collaborative Haptic Experience Design for On-Body Vibrotactile Patterns

Designing vibrotactile experiences collaboratively requires communicating using multiple senses. This is challenging in remote scenarios as designers need to effectively express and communicate their intention while iteratively building and refining experiences, ideally in real-time. We formulate design considerations for collaborative haptic design tools, and propose CollabJam, a collaborative prototyping suite enabling remote synchronous design of vibrotactile experiences for on-body applications. We first outline Collab-Jam's features and present a technical evaluation. Second, we use CollabJam to understand communication and design patterns used during haptic experience design. We performed an in-depth design evaluation spanning four sessions in which four pairs of participants designed and reviewed vibrotactile experiences remotely. A qualitative content analysis revealed how multi-sensory communication is essential to convey ideas, how stimulating the tactile sense can interfere with personal boundaries, and how freely placing actuators on the skin can provide both benefits and challenges.