Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group

This work addresses the use of vibrotactile haptic feedback to transmit background information with variable intrusiveness, when recipients are engrossed in a primary visual and/or auditory task. Our testbed will be a novel urgency-based turn-taking protocol for remote collaboration, and our setup uses inexpensive off-the-shelf technology. We describe two studies designed to (a) perceptually optimize a set of vibrotactile "icons" for our protocol and (b) evaluate users' ability to identify them in the presence of varying degrees of workload. We found that 7 icons learned in approximately 3 minutes were each typically identified within 2.5 s and at 95% accuracy in the absence of workload. With added visual and auditory distractor tasks, the time required to detect a change in haptic icon increased from 1.9 s to an average of 4.3 s. We further provide initial parameters to help designers intelligently balance the need to support communication while minimizing disruption.