Towards Context-aware Automatic Haptic Effect Generation for Home Theatre Environments

The application of haptic technology in entertainment systems, such as Virtual Reality and 4D cinema, enables novel experiences for users and drives the demand for efficient haptic authoring systems. Here, we propose an automatic multimodal vibrotactile content creation pipeline that substantially improves the overall hapto-audiovisual (HAV) experience based on contextual audio and visual content from movies. Our algorithm is implemented on a low-cost system with nine actuators attached to a viewing chair and extracts significant features from video files to generate corresponding haptic stimuli. We implemented this pipeline and used the resulting system in a user study (n = 16), quantifying user experience according to the sense of immersion, preference, harmony, and discomfort. The results indicate that the haptic patterns generated by our algorithm complement the movie content and provide an immersive and enjoyable HAV user experience. This further suggests that the pipeline can facilitate the efficient creation of 4D effects and could therefore be applied to improve the viewing experience in home theatre environments.