Preliminary design of haptic icons from users

Abstract

Haptic icons are useful for blind people as well as normal people to perceive information from their environments. Thus, lots of efforts were given to designing usable haptic icons, but not much progress was made in designing haptic icons so far, in terms of variety and intuitiveness. The purpose of this study is to investigate how to match vibrotactile stimuli with representational information or abstract concepts to design a variety of and intuitive haptic icons. We employed the bi-directional approach to ask users about their association between representational information/abstract concepts and perceived vibrotactile stimuli. Two-staged experiments were conducted with forty participants. From the experiments, verbal descriptions corresponding to each of 36 vibrotactile stimuli and drawings of vibration corresponding to each of 27 representational information/abstract concepts in the context of human-computer interaction were collected. We can conclude that the associations that users described from these experiments would provide the foundation for designing more intuitive haptic icons in enough variety. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.