Haptic and Audio Interaction Design: 4th International Conference

"Hearing is a form of touch. Something that’s so hard to describe, so- thing that comes, sound that comes to you. . . You feel it through your body, and, sometimes, it almost hits your face. " Evelyn Glennie, Touch The Sound The 4th International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design was held in September 2009 in Dresden, Germany (the previous meetings were held in Glasgow, Seoul and Jyv¨ askyl¨ a). The conference is the ?agship event of the communitypromotingresearchandscienti?cprogressintheaudioandhaptic- teraction ?eld. The main focus of the HAID workshop series is to bring together haptic and audio researchers and practitioners who share an interest in ?nding out howthe two modalities can be used together,what arethe relativecontri- tions ofthe di?erentsensorymodalities to the multimodalpercept,andwhatare the design guidelines of multimodal user interfaces. The research challenges in theareaarebestapproachedthroughuser-centereddesign,empiricalstudiesand the developmentofnoveltheoreticalframeworks. Thereis a strongphysicalre- tionship between sound and vibration. Basedon this physicalrelationship, there are signi?cant similarities between auditory and haptic perception. The simil- ities are also observable between audio and haptic user interfaces and actuators. Therefore, the interaction between audio and haptic researchers is promising in developing new products but also understanding unimodal and multimodal perceptual issues. A total of 17 papers were accepted for HAID 2009, each containing novel work on these human-centric topics. Each paper was peer reviewed at least twice using an esteemed set of leading international ?gures from both academia and industry, to whom we are grateful for the quality of their reviews, time and patience.