A 2D haptic glyph method for tactile arrays : Design and evaluation

We present a new framework for information cue rendering on 2D vibrotactile arrays, and we describe an experiment that investigated the feasibility of our approach. The methods are broadly applicable, but our work is motivated by the potential for a tactile array to provide an additional useful channel for information such as location cues related to dataset features or remote user behaviors in visualization systems. Our experiment measured the accuracy with which three basic haptic glyph parameters (position, direction, and an intensity profile) communicated information to users. Results show that multiple parameters can be communicated simultaneously by a glyph, although with reduced accuracy in some cases. In these cases, we give insight into relevant effects to guide the design of improved glyphs. Besides these results, novel contributions of our work are the general information cue approach for 2D arrays (2D haptic glyphs) and the extension of graphical visualization techniques to haptics (glyphs, spatial anti-aliasing, gamma correction).