Preliminary Study of Haptic Media for Future Digital Textbooks

Abstract

A digital textbook is capable to convey knowledge through a variety of learning media. Nowadays a digital textbook is still mainly consisted of verbal explanations which are traditionally called expository text. The conveying of knowledge in the format of expository text can be supported by various media such as graphs, figures, audios, and videos embedded in a digital textbook. These conventional learning media focus on auditory and visual human senses. Therefore, they are insufficient to support the learning of subjective bodily information regarding feeling of touch and sense of force. In this case, adoption of haptic media can potentially fill in the gap. Up to now there is no digital textbook system which is equipped with such supporting media. In a foreseeable future, a digital textbook system can be attached with haptic devices to pass on subjective information such as feeling of touch through human senses other than auditory and visual senses. To make that a reality, it is necessary to explore the potentials of these media to convey subjective bodily information. In this paper, we first present a generic model explaining bodily knowledge acquisition and display with the new media for a future digital textbook system. We then present a preliminary case study exploring possibilities of using a haptic device to convey a potter’s knowledge, specifically the potter’s skills in forming clay cups with a trowel. We introduce our initial experiments and discuss future work in using haptic media to support learning of expository text.