Tactile feedback for ambient awareness in mobile interactions

Brewster, S.A. and Constantin, A. (2010) Tactile feedback for ambient awareness in mobile interactions. In: 24th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction - HCI2010, Dundee, UK, 6-10 Sep 2010,

Abstract

The study of tactile feedback has attracted increasing interest in HCI over recent years. Similar to icons, tactile messages, or Tac-tons, can encode and transmit information through the touch sense [1]. We report an experiment to investigate if we can present contextual information to a user in a low attention, ambient man-ner. In this case, it is done by changing the tactile ‘feel’ of buttons on a touchscreen keyboard to indicate external events, for exam-ple when a friend is close by. Very short Tactons (<=300ms) on each key press were changed in roughness and rhythm to indicate the events. Results showed that users correctly identified the Tactons for the different events with a rate of 88% when 180 Tactons were presented in 45 minutes, and 98% when the Tactons were presented in a more realistic manner. This shows that chang-ing tactile feedback can be an effective method of presenting ambient information on a mobile device.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Brewster, Professor Stephen
• Authors: Brewster, S.A., and Constantin, A.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Publisher: ACM Press