Frozen Suit: Designing a Changeable Stiffness Suit and its Application to Haptic Games

2017. Ahmed Al & Anne Roudaut
CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Abstract

We present the concept of Frozen Suit, a type of clothing that restricts users' movements at joint positions (e.g. elbow, knee) via a changeable stiffness jamming material. The suit can "freeze" users' body parts, for example during a game in order to provide the physical sensation of being frozen by an enemy. In this paper we first present the Frozen Suit concept and its potential applications. We then systematically investigate how to design jamming patches in order to sufficiently restrict an arm or a leg. In particular we used low-fidelity prototypes to explore the restricting power of different material and particles. In order to push this analysis further we conducted a controlled experiment in order to compare the perceived stiffness of different patches sizes attached to the elbow. We performed a paired comparison experience and used a Bradley-Terry-Luce model to analyze the subjective feedback from participants. We found that 20cm long x 7cm large is the most restrictive patch and that an increase in patch area correlates with an increase in perceived stiffness (quadratic). We finish by presenting a use case application with a game that we implemented where enemies can freeze the player.

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Citation

Al Maimani, A., & Roudaut, A. (2017). Frozen suit: designing a changeable stiffness suit and its application to haptic games. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2440–2448). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025655, doi:10.1145/3025453.3025655

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3025453.3025655,
author = {Al Maimani, Ahmed and Roudaut, Anne},
title = {Frozen Suit: Designing a Changeable Stiffness Suit and its Application to Haptic Games},
year = {2017},
isbn = {9781450346559},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025655},
doi = {10.1145/3025453.3025655},
abstract = {We present the concept of Frozen Suit, a type of clothing that restricts users' movements at joint positions (e.g. elbow, knee) via a changeable stiffness jamming material. The suit can "freeze" users' body parts, for example during a game in order to provide the physical sensation of being frozen by an enemy. In this paper we first present the Frozen Suit concept and its potential applications. We then systematically investigate how to design jamming patches in order to sufficiently restrict an arm or a leg. In particular we used low-fidelity prototypes to explore the restricting power of different material and particles. In order to push this analysis further we conducted a controlled experiment in order to compare the perceived stiffness of different patches sizes attached to the elbow. We performed a paired comparison experience and used a Bradley-Terry-Luce model to analyze the subjective feedback from participants. We found that 20cm long x 7cm large is the most restrictive patch and that an increase in patch area correlates with an increase in perceived stiffness (quadratic). We finish by presenting a use case application with a game that we implemented where enemies can freeze the player.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {2440–2448},
numpages = {9},
keywords = {changeable stiffness, clothing, haptic feedback, jamming, paired comparison experiment, wearable},
location = {Denver, Colorado, USA},
series = {CHI '17}
}