Abstract—Floor surfaces are notable for the diverse roles that they play in our negotiation of everyday environments. Haptic communication via floor surfaces could enhance or enable many computer-supported activities that involve movement on foot. In this paper, we discuss potential applications of such interfaces in everyday environments and present a haptically augmented floor component through which several interaction methods are being evaluated. We describe two approaches to the design of structured vibrotactile signals for this device. The first is centered on a musical phrase metaphor, as employed in prior work on tactile display. The second is based upon the synthesis of rhythmic patterns of virtual physical impact transients. We report on an experiment in which participants were able to identify communication units that were constructed from these signals and displayed via a floor interface at well above chance levels. The results support the feasibility of tactile information display via such interfaces and provide further indications as to how to effectively design vibrotactile signals for them. Index Terms—Vibrotactile interfaces, ubiquitous computing, haptic communication design, floor surfaces. Ç 1

Abstract. Interactive surfaces form an integral component of intelligent environments. In the paper, we describe HapticArmrest, a simple tactile interface that communicates tactual surface characteristic and form of interactive elements on direct touch surfaces. Spatially separating manual touch input and active tactile output allows for the combination of various types of tactile actuators for versatile haptic feedback. In a preliminary experiment, we indicate that our approach enables a reliable discrimination of virtual elements on touch surfaces solely based on tactile representations. We also assessed the hedonic and pragmatic qualities of the generated tactile stimuli by applying methods from the field of usability research.

We investigated the haptic cuing of visual attention using spatially-predictive (75 % valid) and spatiallynonpredictive (25%) haptic cues. The participants performed a visual change detection task immediately following a haptic spatial cue whose location corresponded to one of the four visual quadrants. The participants were explicitly instructed to use the spatially-predictive haptic cues but to try and ignore the spatially-nonpredictive cues. In addition to reaction time (RT) data, we recorded participants ’ eyeposition in order to provide a direct measure of overt visual attention. The results indicated that the spatially-predictive haptic cues reduced the amount of time taken to detect the visual changes, as expected. The spatially-nonpredictive cues increased visual search latencies, indicating that the cues could not be ignored completely. There was also evidence that haptic cuing served to alert the participants resulting in an overall reduction of response latencies. 1.

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There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the use of haptic displays to augment human performance, and to provide an additional means of information transfer to interface operators whose visual and/or auditory modalities may be otherwise informationallyoverloaded

This article is the second of a two-part series intended to be an introduction to haptic interfaces, their construction, and application design. Haptic interactions employ mechanical, programmed physical devices that can be used for human-computer communication via the sense of touch. In Part I of this series, we focused on the devices themselves: the classes of hardware schemes currently available or envisioned, the software components that drive them, and specific examples that can be built on the kitchen table. Here in Part II, we broach a topic that is coming into its own; between the vision of a particular utility that haptic feedback theoretically should enable and the hardware capable of delivering the required sensations is the problem of designing the interaction in a usable way.

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The today mainly incorporated sensory modalities vision and hearing are most often highly charged due to an increasing number, as well as a rising complexity of diversified assistance systems in vehicles. These systems, originally developed for ”supporting ” the driver in its tasks, increasingly directs to operation errors caused by cognitive overload. The sense of touch – as additional interaction channel – should have the ability to release cognitive load from visual and auditory channels by adapting in a natural, intuitive and non-distracting manner. A drawback of haptics is that feedback is reliant to both driver- and environmental conditions. For instance, different sizes and weights of drivers ’ result in a changed haptic perceptivity, and vibro-tactile feedback potentially is interpreted erroneous due to personal sitting attitudes. A vibro-tactile seat, endowed with a set of unobtrusive embedded sensors and actuators, is proposed to counteract on these issues. The input channel is used for determining the occupied seating surface and, in addition, is also responsible for observing disruptive vibrations, originating in the environment. These information is employed in order to reconfigure vibro-tactile output dynamically with the aim to guarantee consistent haptic perception for any person.