Haptic Stimulus Design
Overview
Haptic icons are brief, meaningful tactile or force stimuli designed to support the communication of information through the often-underutilized haptic modality. Challenges to producing large, reusable sets of haptic icons include technological constraints and the need for broadly-applicable and validated design heuristics to guide the process. The largest set of haptic stimuli to date was produced through systematic use of heuristics for monotone rhythms. We hypothesized that further extending signal expressivity would continue to enhance icon learnability. We introduced melody into the design of rhythmic stimuli as a means of increasing expressiveness while retaining the principle of systematic design, as guided by music theory. Haptic melodies were evaluated for their perceptual distinctiveness; experimental results from grouping tasks indicated that rhythm dominates user categorization of melodies, with frequency and amplitude potentially left available as new dimensions for the designer to control within-group variation.
Illustrated representation of all 36 haptic icon melodies (in six groups) from our second redesign. Grey notes are low amplitude, raised notes are high frequency. Stimuli are listed left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
Collaborators
This was a group project for CPSC 543 (Physical User Interface Design and Evaluation) and I worked with Brad Swerdfeger and Tom Hazelton. This work was an extension of Brad's MSc thesis work. My main contributions were helping to engineer the icon simulation tool, helping design and carry out the user study, co-presenting results and co-writing the GI conference paper.