TacTalk: Personalizing Haptics Through Conversation

DOI

Haptic experiences are highly personal, but despite prior work exploring interfaces enabling personalization, we don't know what process drives the personalization of haptics. To enable a study of this process, including users' mental models and vocabularies, we introduce TacTalk, a conversational system enabling real time tuning of virtual haptic experiences. We present an application using TacTalk in a popular racing video game, Forza Horizon 5. Through an empirical study, we find that tracking user preference profiles may improve TacTalk's ability to cater to individual differences, and that TacTalk is more usable than an existing slider-based personalization tool. A thematic analysis of participant interviews reveals an archetypal process of conversational personalization - starting with real-world experiences and domain-specific metaphors, then subsequently inspecting specific aspects of the experience including in-game events and the game controller.