Channelling the Inner Voice
Weirding Haptics takes inspiration from the Weirding Module, a sonified weapon from the David Lynch's 1984 Dune movie. Soldiers channel the power of their voice to control weapons and produce various kinds of outcome depending on their performance. With Weirding Haptics, our main goal was to provide interaction means for novice hapticians such as video game programmers, students, or UX designers to design convincing haptics experiences for specific contexts. Since anybody can use their voice to produce a large variety of sounds and replicate specific feelings with it, we proposed to leverage this input means for designing inside a virtual environment. This approach contrasts with state-of-the-art design tools such as the Haptic Composer or the Lofelt Studio as designers do not need to control abstract parameters to produce efficient experiences, nor do they need to have knowledge in haptic design by default. Furthermore, designers can stay immersed in the virtual environment when designing instead of switching back and forth between a workstation and the environment (see picture on the right)

Adapting, Fine-Tuning, Correcting with the Vocalization Layer
One cannot expect novice hapticians to have trained voices that would produce precise vocalizations especially when designing for vibrotactile feedback. Playing raw vocalizations in vibrotactile actuators is therefore not an option. We rather extract amplitudes and frequencies at a given interval from the vocalizations and play them as feedback based on identified spatio-temporal mappings. As you can see on the right-hand picture (b), the Weirding Haptics design tool proposes four different spatio-temporal mappings: instantaneous, continuous, motion, and positional. An instantaneous mapping plays the vibrations only once, while a continuous one plays them indefinitely. A motion mapping builds on a continuous one but varies amplitudes and frequencies based on the movement speed. A positional mapping associate vibrations to spatial landmarks. While a mapping is inferred after recording a vocalization, designers can switch between them through the vocalization layer. To correct for mistakes performed while recording a vocalization, or simply fine-tune it to reach a better result without recording a new one again, a vocalization layer proposes four fine-tune modifiers, see right-hand picture (c).