Embodiments also relate to a haptic symbol set which specify sequences of actuator signals for operating haptic actuators to be generated from input words of a language. However, unlike the system described with regards to FIGS. 11A through 11J, the haptic symbols here are based on units within the written form of the language, rather than phonemes, which are represented in the spoken component of the language. Such units may include consonant-vowel pairs or syllables. Unlike a language such as English, which has a written system that does not break down into syllables or consonant-vowel pairs, other writing systems of other languages have such a feature. For example, the hiragana writing system of Japanese is a syllabary, while the Devanagari script of Hindi is an abugida, i.e., it uses consonant-vowel pairs in the writing system.
FIG. 14A is a block diagram illustrating the components of a system for converting the syllables of input words 1404 to actuator signals 1412 to activate cutaneous actuators 1414 of a haptic device, according to an embodiment.
The input words 1404 are words in a language that can be formed from a limited number of syllables. While languages such as English (and other European languages), when spoken, are formed as syllables as well, the number of possible syllables in such a language exceed 10,000, and thus the syllables of such a language cannot be easily represented by unique sequences of actuator signals. Instead, the input words 1404 may be from a language that can be formed using a limited number of syllables (e.g., under 100), such as with Japanese.