“Invitation to the voyage”: The design of tactile metaphors to fulfill occasional travelers' needs in transportation networks

Abstract

In spite of the availability of journey planners, too many occasional travellers are distressed when facing the complexity of public transportation networks in large cities. So are regular travellers in case of unexpected perturbations. The haptic modality offers a discrete, eyes-free and ear-free channel of communication that can provide useful information to assist users in their travel. This paper presents the metaphor-based and usercentric methodology used to develop the haptic interaction (hardware and haptic patterns). It led to the design of haptic patterns based on user requirements and tested with a custom tactile wrist bracelet. The evaluation shows that patterns were very well recognized in mobility with limited training and reached a good satisfaction level, thus validating the methodology grounded on metaphors and participatory design. Moreover, the results pointed out user differences in perceiving patterns and raised the need to tune the patterns according to the users' choice.

TactiPEd: Easy Prototyping of Tactile Patterns

“…At the end of the tutorial, the participants were asked to create from scratch a pattern corresponding to the "no" nodding metaphor on both devices to assess whether the participant understood the tutorial and could proceed to the tasks. Metaphors were chosen to describe the patterns to create as they are useful for the design of intuitive patterns [21,11]. Devices.…”

“…Solutions to integrate user experience in design frameworks are currently being investigated. One such solution lies in making the prototyping of interactions accessible to all, thus enabling a greater involvement of the user, for example using participatory design [10,11]. This could potentially foster the creativity and intuitiveness [11].…”

Rail Internet of Things: An Architectural Platform and Assured Requirements Model

“…These services are Swipe and Scan Your Surroundings (SaSYS) [14], TalkingTransit [15], and Smart Building Application. They can be used from a smartphone utilising its built-in sensors and customised gestures without requiring additional hardware like Braille keyboards [16], vibrotactile motors attached to a smartphone [17], vibrotactile bracelet [18], etc. The authors proposed an IoT environment where 'things' and places, i.e., points of interest, are assigned with unique identifiers (ucode), which are 128-bit numbers that can be stored into any type of tag medium such as RFID, QR-code, NFC, etc.…”

Sensory Integration of Apparent Motion Speed and Vibration Magnitude

“…Therefore, a tacton should encode the message in an intuitive way to ease the learning of associations. For instance, [5] employed metaphors based on user requirements to design tactile cues for spatial navigation.…”

“…Tactons commonly employ arrays of spatially distributed tactile stimulators and are used in spatial navigation and orientation tasks [5]- [10]. Tactile arrays can be activated in spatio-temporal patterns to create an illusion of apparent tactile motion.…”