Ambient touch: designing tactile interfaces for handheld devices

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the sense of touch as a channel for communicating with miniature handheld devices. We embedded a PDA with a TouchEngine^TM --- a thin, miniature lower-power tactile actuator that we have designed specifically to use in mobile interfaces (Figure 1). Unlike previous tactile actuators, the TouchEngine is a universal tactile display that can produce a wide variety of tactile feelings from simple clicks to complex vibrotactile patterns. Using the TouchEngine, we began exploring the design space of interactive tactile feedback for handheld computers. Here, we investigated only a subset of this space: using touch as the ambient, background channel of interaction. We proposed a general approach to design such tactile interfaces and described several implemented prototypes. Finally, our user studies demonstrated 22% faster task completion when we enhanced handheld tilting interfaces with tactile feedback.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Computers in other domains

    • Personal computers and PC applications

• Computer systems organization

  • Architectures

    • Other architectures

      • Special purpose systems

    • Parallel architectures

      • Cellular architectures

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Graphics systems and interfaces

      • Graphics input devices

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction devices

      • Touch screens