Conversing Using WhatsHap: a Phoneme Based Vibrotactile Messaging Platform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We demonstrate the feasibility and experience of having a haptic conversation using WhatsHap: an instant messaging system that delivers speech or text as a sequence of vibrotactile representations of English phonemes to the arm. Previous haptic speech communication studies established feasibility in single-phoneme or word-level encodings, but did not investigate how such communication functions in practice with real-time remote conversation between two individuals. Participants used WhatsHap through the framework of a joint communication task, where they had to converse to achieve a goal, with 88% of all tasks successfully completed. We analyze conversations and user interviews both qualitatively and quantitatively, describing considerations when building a system to mediate conversation haptically, exploring influences on user conversational experience, and offering an account of how linguistic structure changes to accommodate such a mode of communication. In this regard, phoneme-based haptic conversation led to linguistic forms distinct from written and spoken English. Additionally, participants felt that haptic conversation was best suited for information-centered communication in contexts where there is shared knowledge between users.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".