Investigation into the feasibility of using tactons to provide navigation cues in pedestrian situations

Abstract

Current navigation services do not meet the needs of pedestrians. The displays are often inappropriate. In this paper, we report two experiments to investigate whether using tactile display to present navigation information is sufficient and appropriate in pedestrian situation. The result of those experiments showed that Tactons could be a successful means of communicating navigation information in user interfaces in pedestrian situations.

HaptiMoto

“…Although the magic wand metaphor has proven to be effective and intuivite [35,48,65], it requires user motion that is not feasible for motorcyclists whom must keep their body and hands in a fixed location. The sixth sense metaphor is often used with wearable devices such as multiple vibrating tactors, enabling users to derive the location or navigation of their target destinations in relation to their current location and orientation [13,31,41,42,43,46,50,58]. Sixth sense interfaces benefit users through more passive interaction (i.e., no additional user motion), but has a steeper learning curve for understanding the directional meaning of the feedback.…”

Towards developing perceivable tactile feedback for mobile devices

“…However, communicating distance was not found to be as useful in way-point navigation by foot. Lin et al (2008) described a system that used tactons to provide navigational information to sighted pedestrians. This was thought to be particularly beneficial for individuals in motion, as their visual attention may be focused on the physical environment (e.g.…”

6th senses for everyone!

“…The sixth sense metaphor, as illustrated in Figure 3, describes solutions that use multimodal feedback to alert the user about changes in the environment. This has been applied by issuing turning instructions in vibration patterns [8] as well as cueing the direction in which the user has to go in vibration patterns [14,10]. Both approaches have proven to be effective in user studies.…”

“…Recently a number of research groups have investigated different ways of enhancing Smartphone-based navigation systems with vibro-tactile feedback [8,10,14,15,21]. One emerging metaphor is the sixth sense, which Froehlich et al [3] define as "multimodal feedback to alert users of changes and opportunities in the dynamic environment."…”

“…One emerging metaphor is the sixth sense, which Froehlich et al [3] define as "multimodal feedback to alert users of changes and opportunities in the dynamic environment." For example, Lin et al [8] used encoded turning instructions, such as "turn right now" in vibration patterns. In our previous work [14] we proposed a Tactile Compass that encodes compass directions in vibration patterns.…”