triMorph: Bridging Shape-Change and Cross-Sensory Correspondences for Haptic Interaction
2026. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Zhuzhi Fan, Min Susan Li, Jialin Deng, Amy Ingold & Oussama Metatla.
Cross-sensory correspondences provide opportunities for designing rich multisensory interfaces, with prior work showing that features such as roundness and sharpness are systematically linked to language, color, sound, and emotion. Yet two challenges remain: few technologies can dynamically transition between these features, and little is known about the thresholds at which a form is judged as sufficiently rounded or spiky to realise these cross-sensory effects. We present triMorph, a pneumatic shape-changing interface capable of smoothly morphing between spiky, flat, and rounded configurations. In a psychophysical study with 30 participants, we quantified perceptual accuracy and precision in mapping triMorph shapes to visuo-linguistic categories and examined shape–color and shape–emotion correspondences. Results reveal threshold values for reliable categorisation, with rounded shapes linked to pleasant emotions and lighter colors, and spiky shapes to arousal and darker tones. Our findings provide empirical foundations and design guidelines for grounding shape-changing artefacts more firmly in cross-sensory cognition.
Full paper
https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3772318.3791243
Citation
Fan, Z., Susan Li, M., Deng, J., Ingold, A., & Metatla, O. (2026). Trimorph: bridging shape-change and cross-sensory correspondences for haptic interaction. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–30).
BibTeX
@inproceedings{fan2026trimorph, title={triMorph: Bridging Shape-Change and Cross-Sensory Correspondences for Haptic Interaction}, author={Fan, Zhuzhi and Susan Li, Min and Deng, Jialin and Ingold, Amy and Metatla, Oussama}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}, pages={1--30}, year={2026} }