The HapticWave is a technology designed for audio engineers, musicians and producers with visual impairments.
Much audio editing is very visual, and computer audio workstations are very visual environments. A lot of salient information about a piece of audio can be quickly obtained by a sighted person through looking at the waveform, which is displayed on the screen in most audio editing software. They can almost instantly see things such as locations of silences, where the audio is too loud, drum hits and the overall dynamics of a track.
The HapticWave is intended to provide a non-sighted user with the same information through a different modality – touch- as quickly as possible.
We took the HapticWave to America this summer, where producer and musician Joey Stuckey used it in his studio for a week. Here is a short US TV Item clip about the technology:
Below is a video of drummer and mastering engineer Steve Burge using the HapticWave in one of our UCD workshops
HapticWave -Workshop 3 from RAPIDMIX on Vimeo.
Read more about the design process in our RTD paper which we presented at Microsoft Research:
http://figshare.com/articles/RTD2015_09_HapticWave_presenting_the_multiple_voices_artefacts_and_materials_of_a_design_research_project/1327979
More information can be found out here: http://eavi.goldsmithsdigital.com/projects/depic/