“Emotional Touch” by Hashimoto and Kajimoto

Recently, specifications for handheld devices have been dramatically improved. As the information has become richer, we need to consider a new type of user interface that will co-exist with existing interfaces. These might be audio and visual interfaces that are sufficiently intuitive to reduce a user’s load. A tactile interface is one such possibility.

Many projects have attempted to develop haptic/tactile sensations in handheld devices [1][2][3]. Although these approaches succeeded in presenting literal information, the quality of the sensation is not high and users can feel just a single or only a few kinds of sensations.

There are two types of resolution in a tactile display; spatial and temporal. Conventional tactile displays, such as Braille, seek to achieve higher spatial resolution to display rich “literal” information. We call these, “temporally low, spatially high resolution” tactile displays. On the other hand, as with conventional “wearable” tactile displays, because of limitations of mounting space and power source, one or just a few vibration motors or solenoids are used. Thus, temporal bandwidth is notably narrow. We call these “temporally low, spatially low resolution” tactile displays. In a different approach to these tactile displays, our goal is to display “emotional”, not “literal” information. Because handheld devices already can present figures, photographs, and video through visual displays, they do not need to present shape by tactile sensation. For our goal, temporal bandwidth is much more important than spatial resolution. Our strategy is thus to present richer expressions of tactile sensations by improving the temporal bandwidth while keeping the spatial resolution low (Figure 1 right).

References

[1] Y.Sekiguchi, K.Hirota and M.Hirose: Haptic Interface Using Estimation of Box Contents Metaphor, ICAT2003 (2003).

[2] I. Poupyrev, S. Maruyama and J. Rekimoto: TouchEngine: A Tactile Display for Handheld Devices, Proc. CHI 2002 (2002), 644-645.

[3] H.Yano, M.Yoshie and H.Iwata: Development of a Non-Grounded Haptic Interface Using the Gyro Effect, Proc. Haptic Symposium 2003 (2003), 32-39.