Sound-Specific Vibration Interface using Digital Signal Processing

The adoption of vibration interfaces in the games and the virtual reality is increasing since they improve the user experience. The principle of existing vibrating devices is to vibrate when detecting the presence of particular frequency bands. However such frequency-based scheme, according to our survey, cannot meet the user expectation; they vibrate too often and even at unwanted moments, having users feel haptically-numb soon and being annoyed. We develop a sound-specific vibration interface. It is wrist-wearable and vibrates at only designated target sounds. It uses a real time sound matching algorithm. Using the FFT, the algorithm compares the similarity of the frequency distribution between the input sound and the target sounds. In the performance test applying the interface to a commercial game,the matching success rate was 80% while the computation delay was 415 ms. Such results confirm the applicability of the proposed interface to the game play.