In 2014 and 2015, Immersion was pushing to prove haptics on mobile, both as a licensable technology and as something people could actually feel in everyday media. Three pieces of that effort fit together: a world-first haptic video campaign, the app that distributed and demoed haptic content, and the icon set for those apps. I worked across all three.
You could feel the title card's animation.
Homeland: a world-first haptic video campaign
Homeland was the first video enhanced with haptic effects made publicly available to Android users in a campaign. We worked with Showtime to get an early trailer for the show's upcoming season, and I designed the entire haptic track for it: effects that tracked the picture, from fire and explosions and breaking glass to the motion of the title cards. I also designed the bumper that ran before the trailer, the bouncing "enhanced with tactile effects" intro, authoring both the motion asset and its haptics.
Content Portal: distributing and demoing haptic content
Content Portal was the Android app that carried this content: a way to distribute haptically enhanced video for creators, and a demo platform for showing the technology off. I designed it to Android's Material Design, with large thumbnails to push the content forward and a one-tap "download all." Signing in revealed account-specific content and shifted the drawer's color as a quiet status cue. The detail I still like: a mute button for haptics in the player. It proved invaluable for sales and demos, since with haptics on by default some people didn't consciously notice them. Toggling them off and back on made the contrast obvious, and that contrast is what makes the technology's value land for someone feeling it the first time.
Large thumbnails push the content forward.
App iconography
The demo apps needed icons, so I designed them as a small system. The Content Portal icon used chevrons to show vibration emanating outward; it tested most popular against the alternatives. The wearables demos shared an analog-watch-face motif: the minute and second hands form an "A" for the Instinctive Alerts language, an artist's compass for the design demo, and a rising sun on the horizon for the forward-looking one. Small canvas, consistent thinking.
