Kumulative Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2024

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Von der genannten Lizenzangabe ausgenommen sind folgende Bestandteile dieser Dissertation: Die Poster "Physical Fights Back" (S. 192), "Semantic Differentiation of Haptic Edges Rendered on an Electrostatic Friction Modulation Display" (S. 253) und "An Exploratory Evaluation of Participants’ Reaction to Electrostatic Friction Modulation" (S. 254) sowie die Artikel "Theoretical Framework of Haptic Processing Framework in Automotive User Interfaces" (S. 207-224) und "Function Follows Form" (S. 228-250) stehen unter der CC-Lizenz CC BY.
Lizenzvertrag: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In recent years automotive interiors have been dominated by the transition from traditional analog button interfaces towards the digitalization of interaction. This led to a reduction of hardware keys, surface-integration of control panels, and fusion of design and interactive surface, ultimately resulting in the implementation of large, mostly flat, and featureless interactive surfaces. This trend towards surface-integration of tangible user interfaces creates an apparent conflict of aesthetics and usability — especially in safety-relevant interactions like automotive. Despite pleasing and modern-looking, featureless surfaces lack the subtle search haptic sensations from analog button interfaces that constitute a high-quality impression and a safe, easy, and potentially eyes-free interaction.

Haptic technologies — passive or active — are increasingly implemented in featureless surfaces to restore the tangibility known from traditional interfaces in order to resolve the conflict of aesthetics and usability. Despite many potentially suitable technologies, the typical approach has primarily been technology-focused. Fundamental psychological, perception, and design aspects of haptic interfaces are often neglected during development. There is no common understanding of bridging the gap between tactually rich, analog and modern, large, flat digital interface surfaces to retain the strong tactile impression of traditional analog button interfaces. This thesis focuses on what "good" search haptics means, discusses user-centered requirements for potential technologies and proposes basic search haptic design principles. The goal is to explore how passive and active haptic technologies must be implemented to design a rich search haptic impression that supports a potentially eyes-free interaction on otherwise flat and seamless surfaces.

The thesis is organized into four parts: Part 1 gives a general introduction to haptics and describes the fundamentals of haptic perception. Furthermore, it presents an experience-focused categorization methodology of current haptic technologies and a psychologically-driven framework for the haptic design of automotive user interfaces. Part 2 examines associative and communicative characteristics of passive haptic forms concerning their fitting and benefit for search haptics. Part 3 explores the design space of active haptic technologies, particularly electrostatic friction modulation, for search haptic interactions. Part 4 concludes and discusses all research findings concerning how technologies can be utilized for appropriate search haptic design. It derives guidelines for the design of search haptic impulses in automotive interfaces.