Skin Reading

Conveying language through haptics

“…While this study did not present a stream of phonemes at a fixed presentation rate, this would be a next step towards presenting full messages. A similar study encoding haptic cues to letters using vibrotactors on the back of a user's hand [13] achieved a presentation rate of 70 ms per letter with 5 hours of training. The current presentation rate of the MISSIVE is 350 ms per cue, but the device is located on a part of the body that would not be invasive for many daily activities, meaning that it does not have as fine of a perceptual resolution.…”

“…Regardless of the type of building-block used to convey language, we need to provide a distinct cue set of at least 26 cues. The main approach in current research to provide these large cue sets is through combinations of vibrotactors [5,9,13,15,16,18,22], due to the wide variety of possible variations of vibrotactile cues including amplitude, frequency, and waveforms. However, interference is a common problem in vibrotactile arrays when the vibrotactors are spaced too close together.…”

“…However, with the increased complexity of temporal cues [10], the duration of haptic cues extends to undesirable lengths, and can negatively impact presentation speed. Additionally, haptic language devices that rely on the high sensitivity of skin found on the fingertips [7,8,11,19] or on the hands [13] occupy real estate that is necessary for many activities. While better perception can be obtained in these areas [14], these devices are not usable in an everyday environment due to their contact location.…”

Vibrotactile patterns using sensitivity prioritisation

“…Nevertheless, haptic feedback can of transmitting rich information without the need to perceive it through auditory or visual channels. There is already extensive research exploring capabilities of haptic feedback for different purposes, such as skin reading [8,19], navigation aids [5,4], presenting visual information to car drivers [26], assistive systems in medical surgery [14], enabling haptic experiences in story telling [34], and enhancing experiences on virtual reality [3,17], augmented reality [13,31], and multi-media systems [22,23,28].…”

“…The primary focus of our research is offering methods for haptic displays to encode a vocabulary of symbols that can be combined into complex messages. Such methods can be used, for example, to perceive natural language messages encoded in vibrotactile patterns [8,19]. The proposed methods can benefit displays with broad application possibilities.…”