Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

Evita

EVITA is a tactile feedback tablet, produced by Hap2U SME company, based in grenoble. It is presented at CES in january 2017, the SME has been awarded a CES innovation award. This device is issued from a strong collaboration with MINT group. Eric Vezzoli PhD thesis, contributed significantly to this device. EVITA is a very generic interaction device, and several projects are currently being discussed for understanding the fields of applications of this device. It is also, in particular, the hardware support for our haptic book for children, described below, that is our second highlight for this raweb.

Haptic book

The first digital book augmented with a high fidelity feedback has been released in October 2016. Based on a scenario and illustrations made by Dominique Maes - an artist from Belgium - this haptic book was presented for the first time during "la nuit des bibliothèques" in Lille. The popularity of this project as well as its possible social outcomes were underlined in a paper in a national magazine ("Science et Avenir", November 2016)

Forum Oeuvres et Recherches

MINT played an active role in the "Oeuvres et recherches" project (http://www.cristal.univ-lille.fr/oeuvres-et-recherches/), a platform that aims at higlighting and supporting collaborations between researchers and artists in the Hauts-de-France and in Belgium. Since 2010, these collaborations have resulted in significant contributions for these two communities at the regional and national levels. Organised at the Université de Lille on December 2nd 2016, the F O O R event was an opportunity to review more than five years of art-science projects in the region and Belgium, highlighted more than 40 art-science projects, and more importantly to prepare the future and discuss strategies for supporting such projects.

ControllAR

The ControllAR project, started in 2016, investigates the appropriation of visual feedback on control surfaces for multimedia production systems. It has already yielded many results. The system and results of a study on electronic musicians were presented both as a paper and as a demo at the ACM Internation conference on Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 16) where it received a best demo award. The software was released and is available at http://forge.lifl.fr/ControllAR. ControllAR was also presented during multiple events, both for the general public and for electronic musicians. The project continues with the design of a portable hardware solution and a long term study of the effects of the system on musicians' playing techniques.

Awards

• Best demo award for ControllAR : appropriation of visual feedback on control surfaces   [16] @ ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 16).

• Best work in progress at Eurohaptics 2016 for the work The human perception of transient frictional modulation, David Gueorguiev, Eric Vezzoli, André Mouraux, Betty Semail, Jean-Louis Thonnard

• SME Hap2U had a "CES innovation award", based on the collaboration that MINT group has with them (E-vita tactile feedback tablet) at CES (january 2017).