Studies suggest that imbalances in speaking opportunities during meetings often lead to sub-optimal meeting outcomes. These imbalances can be due to a variety of reasons, including people’s perception of speakers and their voice. Indeed, speakers with higher pitched voices were shown to be perceived as having lower leadership ability. In an attempt at countering such voice-pitch related biases, this work introduces BarryWhaptics, a real-time speech-to-haptics conversion system that leverages multimodal perception to alter the listener’s perception of a speaker. The system operates by augmenting human speech with vibration, applying more intense vibrations to voices that would ordinarily be considered low in dominance. Results from a pilot study assessing the influence of the system in a decision-making task demonstrate that it can meaningfully influence how users choose to follow instructions given by one speaker over another.

As haptics have become an ingrained part of our wearable experience, particularly through phones, smartwatches and fitness trackers, significant research effort has been conducted to find new ways of using wearable haptics to convey information, especially while we are on-the-go. In this article, instead of focusing on aspects of haptic information design, such as tacton encoding methods, actuators, and technical fabrication of devices, we address the more general recurring issues and “gotchas” that arise when moving from core haptic perceptual studies and in-lab wearable experiments to real world testing of wearable vibrotactile haptic systems. We summarize key issues for practitioners to take into account when designing and carrying out in-the-wild wearable haptic user studies, as well as for user studies in a lab environment that seek to simulate real-world conditions. We include not only examples from published work and commercial sources, but also hard-won illustrative examples derived from issues and failures from our own haptic studies. By providing a broad-based, accessible overview of recurring issues, we expect that both novice and experienced haptic researchers will find suggestions that will improve their own mobile wearable haptic studies.