No abstract

Previous research demonstrated the ability for users to accurately recognize tactile textures on mobile surface. However, the experiments were only run in a lab setting and the ability for users to recognize tactile texture in a real-world environment remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate the effects of physical challenging activities on tactile textures recognition. We consider five conditions: (1) seated on an office, (2) standing in an office, (3) seated in the tramway, (4) standing in the tramway and (5) walking in the street. Our findings indicate that when walking, performances deteriorated compared to the remainder conditions. However, despite this deterioration, the recognition rate stay higher than 82% suggesting that tactile texture could be effectively recognized and used by users in different physical challenges activities including walking.

Alongside vision and sound, hardware systems can be readily designed to support various forms of tactile feedback; however, while a significant body of work has explored enriching visual and auditory communication with interactive systems, tactile information has not received the same level of attention. In this work, we explore increasing the expressivity of tactile feedback by allowing the user to dynamically select between several channels of tactile feedback using variations in finger speed. In a controlled experiment, we show that a user can learn the dynamics of eyes-free tactile channel selection among different channels, and can reliable discriminate between different tactile patterns during multi-channel selection with an accuracy up to 90% when using two finger speed levels. We discuss the implications of this work for richer, more interactive tactile interfaces.