Crafting Remote Intimacy: Designing Onni for Affective Haptic Communication Across Distance

This pictorial presents Onni, a replicable open-source toolkit and tangible interface designed to support affective haptic interactions in long-distance relationships. Onni enables remote partners to share gestures and receive personalized haptic feedback, facilitating the co-construction of intimate, embodied meanings beyond verbal or visual modalities. We document a Research through Design process across five prototype iterations that refine actuation, sensing, form, and assembly into a compact device with authoring software for customizable mappings between gesture input and vibrotactile output. We contribute distilled design knowledge behind key decisions across iterations, and call for co-creation studies and in-the-wild deployments to examine how customizable haptic interaction practices take shape in everyday life.