Opus
Digital emotion, made tactile.
My final-year industrial design thesis at the University of Houston, now continued as ongoing research at OpusLABS. A neck-worn interface exploring how subtle physical sensations might give digital interactions an embodied, expressive quality.
What could a message feel like?
A message can carry warmth, urgency, hesitation, or care. On a screen, much of that emotional texture is compressed into text and symbols. Opus began with the question of whether digital emotion could be expressed through touch.
I developed the first version as my final-year industrial design thesis at the University of Houston. The project combined research into embodied interaction with a silicone wearable, small vibration motors, electronics prototypes, and a proposed haptic language.
The neck-worn form puts the interaction near the body while leaving the hands and eyes available. It also makes comfort, intimacy, and the meaning of a sensation central design questions.
A digital epidermis.
An interface felt at the edge of the self.
That phrase describes the project’s ambition: technology experienced through the body, with a language more subtle than another screen or notification.
The design work moves between the object and the experience—how it rests, how it feels, and how a person learns what a tactile gesture might mean.
Design around sensation.
The thesis process moved through contextual scenarios, self-observation, electronics trials, material studies, and prototype wear. Silicone and the placement of vibration motors were explored together, because the material changes how a sensation reaches the skin.
Comfort and recognition are inseparable in this kind of interaction. A tactile cue needs to be noticeable enough to understand, gentle enough to coexist with daily life, and distinct enough to learn. The project treats those as questions to investigate through prototypes.
A vocabulary of touch.
Early haptic patterns explored how different arrangements, rhythms, and intensities might communicate emotional cues. The continuing work develops that idea into an expressive haptic library rather than treating vibration as a single generic alert.
The AI direction considers how the emotional tone of a digital interaction could be interpreted and mapped to that vocabulary. Personalization matters because a pattern does not have one universal meaning: a person’s response, context, and familiarity shape the experience.
The open questions remain human ones as much as technical ones: what is learnable, what is comfortable, and when does a tactile interpretation help someone feel more present?
Can an interface create a feeling of presence without asking for more attention?
A continuing inquiry.
Opus carries the thesis into independent research at OpusLABS. The work connects hardware experimentation, an emotional-haptic library, AI interpretation, and exploration of a companion app.
The ongoing research examines learnable tactile language, adaptive behavior, sensing, comfort, and everyday usefulness. These visualizations help communicate the questions and the form through which they are explored.
The project also connects to my writing about objects, emotional meaning, anthropomorphism, and the language we use with AI. Those ideas influence what I choose to prototype—and prototyping gives those ideas something to push against.
Read The Emotional Resonance of DesignRead The Problem with “You”