Mobile and Pervasive Home > Synthetic Tactile Feedback

Synthetic Tactile Feedback

Overview

Background and Aims

The question this project investigates is: How can we represent synthetic tactile feedback at the human-computer interfaces? While effective human-computer interaction (HCI) systems incorporate multimodal features, it is argued that our understanding of alternative sensory channels and how we use them to carry information is poor. Vigorous multimodal applications such as speech recognition and tactile interpretation require long-term research effort to solve several open issues. True multimodal interface cannot take place until problems in each modality application are successfully addressed. Compared to visual and auditory interfaces, tactile interaction study is still in its early stage, but fast-growing and promising. Psychophysics studies inform us that haptic channel has the largest bandwidth and, if appropriately deployed, it is able to deliver a vast amount of information. However, other issues such as synthetic tactile information representation in relation to human perception remain unanswered. This project attempts to increase our understanding of tactile information representation, thereby increasing our knowledge of how best to represent information via the tactile channel in an interactive multimodal system.

Expected Contribution

This project will try to develop a theoretical understanding of tactile psychophysics in relation to human haptic perception in HCI. Semiotics, the science of signs, is proposed as a bridging concept to describe how best to represent information in the form of synthetic tactile feedback.

Forming a solid basis for this study involves clarification of tactile properties such as frequency, amplitude and waveforms in effect to human perception. For this purpose, an investigation of the use of tactile channel to convey meaningful gestalts of information will be undertaken. A series of detailed experiments will be carried out to demonstrate that the use of the tactile channel is both possible and effective. For example, we aim to report on user's perception insights, through the investigation and evaluation of their tactile modality preference for different combination of tactile patterns.