Design and application of 2D illusory vibrotactile feedback for hand-held tablets

Abstract

In this study, we investigate whether the "out of body" vibrotactile illusion known as funneling could be applied to enrich and thereby improve the interaction performance on a tablet-sized media device. First, a series of pilot tests was taken to determine the appropriate operational conditions and parameters (such as the tablet size, holding position, minimal required vibration amplitude, and the effect of matching visual feedback) for a two-dimensional (2D) illusory tactile rendering method. Two main experiments were then conducted to validate the basic applicability and effectiveness of the rendering method, and to further demonstrate how the illusory tactile feedback could be deployed in an interactive application and actually improve user performance. Our results showed that for a tablet-sized device (e.g., iPad mini and iPad), illusory perception was possible (localization performance of up to 85%) using a rectilinear grid with a resolution of 5 7 (grid size: 2.5 cm) with matching visual feedback. Furthermore, the illusory feedback was found to be a significant factor in improving the user performance in a 2D object search/attention task.