Haptic technology in society: A sentiment analysis of public engagement

Abstract

With the rapid rise of metaverse spaces, the integration of haptic technology has become an integral part of users' immersion and engagement in different domains. This study shades the light on public engagement with haptic technology applications in various contexts. The YouTube Application Programming Interface was used to extract data about haptic technology within a specific time period. Public engagement was estimated based on users' cognitive and behavioral engagement with haptic-video materials. A topic modeling approach was used to extract the main topics associated with haptic technology. The main types of users’ emotions and their word association were extracted using the association rules mining technique. The results showed that public engagement with haptic technology was mostly observed in few categories (e.g., gaming). Joy and positive sentiments were strongly associated with the extracted topics. The findings offer new insights into the tendency of utilizing haptic technology across communities. The outcomes can help industries and decision makers understand ways to improve the integration of haptic technology in according to the needs of specific domains.