Improving vibrotactile pattern identification for mobile devices using perceptually transparent rendering

ABSTRACT

At present, vibration feedback is widely used to improve the limited user interface of a mobile device. Despite recent advances of miniature actuator technology, a vibration motor is still a dominant actuator for commercial mobile devices. In this paper, we present a new vibration rendering method which can enhance the identification of mobile device vibrations produced by a vibration motor. Whereas the traditional method separates vibrations in voltage applied to the motor, we partition vibrations in their perceived intensity using perceptually transparent rendering. An empirical evaluation using absolute identification showed that our rendering method can improve perception performance in terms of correct identification rate and the amount of information transfer. The results suggest that perceptually transparent rendering can contribute to increasing the number of discrete vibrations that can be used for information delivery via a mobile device, e.g., for the priorities of phone calls.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction devices

      • Haptic devices