UIST 2025 eTactileKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Electro-Tactile Haptic Design

Electro-tactile interfaces—which deliver tactile sensations through electrical stimulation of skin nerves—offer unique advantages like fast response times, thin flexible form factors, and the ability to simulate textures, softness, and even coldness. But designing them has been notoriously difficult, requiring deep electronics expertise and custom hardware. eTactileKit changes that. This open-source toolkit provides end-to-end support: modular hardware that scales from 8 to 128+ electrodes, design tools for creating 2D and 3D electrode layouts, a Processing-based pattern creator with visual simulation, a GUI for real-time testing and calibration, and APIs for Python and Unity. A three-week study with both novice and experienced designers showed the toolkit significantly lowered the barrier to entry while improving design workflows—enabling rapid prototyping of applications from VR haptic buttons to 3D-printed interactive toys.

Praneeth Bimsara Perera, Ravindu Madhushan Pushpakumara, Hiroyuki Kajimoto, Arata Jingu, Jürgen Steimle, and Anusha Withana. 2025. eTactileKit: A Toolkit for Design Exploration and Rapid Prototyping of Electro-Tactile Interfaces. In The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747796