Abstract
Understanding what people want to touch in daily life has been one of the central topics in the fields of haptic science, engineering, and marketing. Several studies have addressed the topic, however, their findings were highly dependent on the experimental stimuli in the laboratory environment. In this study, we tried to gain insights into targets that people want to touch in daily life by conducting a Twitter survey. We collected a considerable amount of Japanese Twitter posts containing references to the desire for touch. To capture the motivation underlying these desires in relation to haptic properties, we used several queries that comprehensively covered exploratory procedures. The results showed that targets that people wanted to touch depended on the exploratory procedures in the queries used (e.g., "want to stroke" tended to target people and animals). We also found that these targets were desirable to touch not only for their haptic properties but also as a means of communicating with other people or living animals. Our findings would be important for understanding human haptic function in the real world and for developing consumer haptic displays and applications.
Highlights
IntroductionPeople touch target surfaces to assess their texture, make physical contact with familiar people or animals for communication, or feel the condition of targets through tools such as pliers
I N daily life, people touch many kinds of targets around them
The comparison with the occurrence probabilities of target words in the general query, which is considered to be less sensitive to specific haptic properties, will allow us to determine the characteristic words for the focused queries
Summary
People touch target surfaces to assess their texture, make physical contact with familiar people or animals for communication, or feel the condition of targets through tools such as pliers. From the viewpoint of haptic saliency, Metzger et al [5] investigated what people preferentially touch within an object surface and Lau et al [6] investigated where on a 3D object people would touch it These studies successfully identified the shapes or textures that induce participants to touch, it still remains unknown to what extent people want to touch such experimentally wellcontrolled stimuli when they do not have the experimenter’s guidance in everyday life. People sometimes want to touch other’s body parts such as hands, heads, or shoulders that have largely different shapes and surface properties depending on the communication situation. They sometimes want to hit/tap a specific product like a drum or a keyboard to get the tactile feedback
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