Abstract
What
if you could interact with your mobile phone not just with your
eyes and ears, but through your sense of touch as well?
Current
user interfaces for mobile and handheld computing platforms principally
offer user interaction through the visual and auditory modalities.
However, mobile devices may be used in a wide variety of contexts
that impair the effectiveness of those modalities. At the same
time, more and more functionality is being layered upon mobile
devices, while the physical size of the display and keypad has
remained small. These limitations in the rate of information that
can be exchanged between user and device represent challenges
for mobile interaction design. Haptics offers a potential solution
by providing an additional sensory modality that is also especially
well-suited to the demands of portable, personal devices that
are in contact with the user's skin.
Working in collaboration with members of the McGill
University Haptics Lab, we developed a handheld prototype
that incorporates a compact, lightweight, low-power tactile display
using piezoelectric actuators to stretch tiny areas of fingertip
skin. This display produces a sensation that is much more naturalistic
and versatile than simple vibration. The prototype is not currently
wireless, but it does allow us to explore aspects of user experience
related to operating a multimodal device held in the hand.
Our
studies with human users have taken us on a journey of learning
about what people can feel with the device, how people react to
the concept of browsing a mobile web page aided by touch, and
whether certain kinds of tactile cues can improve navigation performance.
Along the way we also gained a better understanding of key technical
issues for implementing our concept of mobile haptics: lightweight
display technologies, the control model, and rapid prototyping
methods for small-scale tactile user experiences.
This
project is nearing completion as it reaches its goals of identifying
promising areas for further mobile haptics application development
and serving as a case study for a full iteration of an interaction
design process. Work in the mobile haptics area will be continued
by other members of the SPIN Lab and McGill Haptics Lab.
Demo
Movie
For
Further Information
-
Luk,
J., Pasquero,
J., Little, S., MacLean,
K., Hayward,
V., Levesque,
V. (2006). A role for haptics in mobile interaction: initial design using a handheld tactile display prototype, in
Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems, CHI '06, Montreal, Canada, April 2006. (CHI
Best
Paper Award winner).
-
Presentation
on the above paper at CHI 2006 in Montréal. PowerPoint
Format (12MB) | Movie Pak (290MB)
-
www.laterotactile.com
(maintained by McGill Haptics Lab) project
page and device
hardware page
-
Pasquero,
J.,
Luk, J., Little, S.
MacLean, K. E.
2006. Perceptual
Analysis of Haptic Icons: an Investigation into the Validity
of Cluster Sorted MDS. Proc. 14th Symposium on
Haptic Interfaces For Virtual Environment And Teleoperator
Systems IEEE VR 2006. pp. 437-444.
-
Pasquero,
J., Luk, J., Levesque,
V., Wang,
Q., Hayward,
V., and MacLean,
K.E. Distributed Tactile Display for Rich Haptic
Interaction with a Handheld Information Display.
Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2006. In
progress.
-
Luk,
J. Using Haptics to Address Mobile Interaction
Design Challenges: Protoyping
and User Evaluation with a Handheld Tactile Display.
UBC Master's Thesis, July 2006.
-
Article in The
Province newspaper,
April 27, 2006. "They're
Just Sensational"
-
Article
in New
Scientist, July 14, 2006. "Gadgets
get the feel of the tactile world"
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