Nihar Sabnis after successfully defending his thesis. Photo: MPI-INF/Bertram Somieski
On Monday, 09 March 2026 Nihar G. Sabnis defended his thesis with the title: “Re-envisioning Touch: Designing Embodied Material and Force Experiences with Motion-Coupled Vibrotactile Feedback”. Since October 2021 he was PhD student in Computer Science at the Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarbrücken and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics under the supervision of Dr. Paul Strohmeier and Prof. Hans-Peter Seidel, head of Department “Computer Graphics”. The doctoral degree is awarded by Saarland University.
Abstract of the thesis:
When we interact with the world through the sense of touch, for instance while stretching fabric, pressing a sponge, twisting an object, or gripping a tool, our movements generate subtle vibrations that help us perceive material properties such as texture, softness, and force. These vibrations are tightly coupled to our actions. In contrast, most digital systems rely on “buzz-buzz” vibrations that feel artificial and disconnected from our movements.
In my thesis, I explore how synchronizing vibration with user action — what I call motion-coupled vibration — can transform digital touch from a passive signal into an embodied, action-driven experience. Over the period of my PhD, I developed low-latency open-source hardware to render motion-coupled vibration, explored how motion-coupled vibration can help to create intuitive tactile symbols, conducted psychophysics studies to investigate the perceptual mechanisms which make motion-coupled vibration feel embodied, and extended single limb virtual material rendering using motion-coupled vibration to bimanual material experiences such as stretching, bending and twisting. My research demonstrates how motion-coupled vibration can evoke richer sensations of materiality, connectedness, and force without mechanical actuation. Together, these contributions help in understanding motion-coupled vibration better while extending their applicability to create more natural and embodied material experiences, while pushing the frontier of experiences created using vibrotactile feedback.