[Unity, C#, IMGUI, UI Toolkit] An Editor Window to visually inspect and edit advanced haptic patterns.

During my work as a mobile games developer I was once assigned the task to handle vibrations. I learned about the possibilities of enhancing gameplay with haptic feedback, especially on iPhones which have superior haptic motors compared to most Android phones. Apple even introduced a special file format for controlling amplitude and frequency of vibrations called AHAP (which is just a fancy JSON). Inspired by tools like Lofelt Studio (not available anymore) and Haptrix (only on macOS) I created a tool to edit these assets directly in Unity in my spare time. The other feature I wanted to include was to draw an audio waveform so that user could easier synchronize sound and vibration.

First version - IMGUI

First version was created using IMGUI and Handles API.

Second version - UI Toolkit

After completing the first version I decided to recreate everything using Unity’s new UI solution. IMGUI requires a lot of code for drawing all the controls. Now I could build out all UI in UI Builder (visual editor). For drawing the plot I used Vector API available since Unity 2022 (final effect shown in first image).

Generating haptic effects

To demonstrate how the tool works I added 2 algorithms using third party code to generate haptic patterns - available in the right side panel. First uses beat detection to create transient events (clicks), the other creates a continuous event with loudness and fourier transform calculation. These methods are rather simple but may be a good starting point.

Repository

Repository for this project is available here.

Demo

To check (or rather to feel) if the output makes any sense I coded a simple app that downloads sounds and AHAP files from given links and allows their playback.

Link to app. Test sound and vibration files are available under QR codes below (QR code reader included in app).