Welcome to the Haptic Authoring Tool Box

This site contains information on a variety of different haptic authoring tools (HATs), ranging from SDKs to complete interactive environments. While most support designing for and controlling vibrotactile devices, some tools do include support for force feedback, skin stretch or compression, and temperature control.

HAT Box is intended to provide high-level information on a large number of these haptic authoring tools to aid in searching for and making comparisons between them. By compiling information from a variety of sources and creating a high-level taxonomy to aid in describing, comparing, and filtering tools, HAT Box aims to be of use in searching for tools and creating new ones. This project also provides a place for these creators to archive and link to information on their work so it can be more easily located, even after active development of a tool has ended.

More information about HAT Box and its goals can be found on the FAQ page.

To see the current list of entries, go to the Tools page or use the search bar.

For more information about the taxonomy, please consult the Tool Information page or read our paper:

Juliette Regimbal, Cyan Kuo, and Jeremy R Cooperstock. 2026. Understanding Haptic Authoring Tools through a Taxonomy and Descriptive Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), April 13–17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790575

For information on how to provide feedback on HAT Box or to add or modify an entry for a haptic authoring tool, please read the project’s contributor information page.