Rui Huang

Curiosity . Tangibility . Positivity

Rui has ten years of experience leading in-house new product innovation (NPI) through the synergy of design, technology, and business in a global setting.

Motivated by curiosity and the desire to bring a ray of hope into people’s lives, he has taken evolving roles as design lead, design engineer, and strategist across diverse fields and industries to explore and examine the reciprocal relationships between design and technology, and to understand their values, potentials, and impacts on the scale of individuals, society, and the environment.

His most recent research focuses on the future of design innovation in the areas of tangible human-machine interaction and anthropometry-informed design practice for smart wearables.

Tangio Hapmantics™ aims to reimagine the future of digital communication by creating the First Tactile-based Semantic Library with a Tangible User Interface to introduce surrounding haptic stimulations into remote conversations.

Background

We have been through a challenging period that has accelerated the transition to a hyper-digital lifestyle with the adaption to a new norm of remote living, communication, and working. Under such change and with the booming market in the metaverse, our interaction with the external world and one another has shifted from being physical to being more remote and virtual-based. Incorporating a multilayered hyper-grid system with a "virtual" layer that blends into its "physical" presence, the world we live in has developed into a mixed reality that extends beyond its physical existence.

Challenges

We aren't, though, either psychologically or physically ready for such transformation. Our psychological and physical health have been profoundly influenced by the present virtual-based human-machine-interaction (HMI) model, which heavily disregards tactile senses. Recent studies have found a link between touch deprivation and mental health that is significant, increasing the risk of PTSD, alexithymia, depression, and other mental diseases by up to 40%. It has also been demonstrated that immunological illnesses and personality disorders have a strong positive correlation with affection deprivation brought on by the loss of touch and tactile sensations. Additionally, it goes against the gregarious nature of humans, which depends on sensing and engaging with their physical surroundings in order to gather information, communicate, make emotional bonds, and grow cognitively.

Tasks

Given the foregoing, my intervention aims to transform the existing virtual HMI model by incorporating a new layer of communication, the tangible interface, to translate information such as gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, emotions, and other stimuli from in-person conversation into the haptic and tangible representations. The goal is to investigate new medium and sensorial stimulus that will suit better in the digital context for affective haptic communication and to transcend the physical boundaries between users in their daily communication.