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Conference Paper
Speculating the Impacts of Mediated Social Touch Technology
- Authors
- Russian (Ruo-Xuan) Wu, Tim Moesgen, Myung Jin (MJ) Kim, Xinyan Yu, Naoki Kameyama, Anusha Withana, Marius Hoggenmueller, Luke Hespanhol
- Issue Date
- 2026-06
- Citation
- Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS) 2026, pp.4670-4686
- Publisher
- ACM
- Language
- English
- Type
- Conference Paper
- Abstract
- With growing research on haptic interfaces, Mediated Social Touch (MST) technologies offer the potential to record, synthesise, and reproduce (RSR) touch experiences across space and time, enabling, for instance, a hug from afar and from the past. Although much of the existing research highlights the direct benefits of these systems, such as reducing loneliness and providing emotional support, little attention has been paid to their broader sociotechnical impacts. To address this gap, we used the Future Ripples method to speculate on possible effects of MST. We conducted three workshops with 24 participants, including potential users, domain experts, and haptics researchers. Throughout these sessions, participants collectively envisioned possible future scenarios, alongside opportunities and threats, and proposed actionable responses. Our qualitative analysis organised these insights into four themes and three distinctive challenges. These findings offer haptics researchers intervention points across the RSR pipeline to inform MST design, alongside methodological insights from applying Future Ripples to MST technology.
- KSP Keywords
- Future Scenarios, Haptic Interface, Mediated social touch, Potential Users, Touch technology, domain experts, emotional support, qualitative analysis
This work is distributed under the term of Creative Commons License (CCL)
(CC BY)
(CC BY)
