Tactile feedback enhanced hand gesture interaction at large, high-resolution displays

  • Authors:
  • Stephanie Foehrenbach;Werner A. König;Jens Gerken;Harald Reiterer

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Konstanz, HCI Group, Box D-73, 78457 Konstanz, Germany;University of Konstanz, HCI Group, Box D-73, 78457 Konstanz, Germany;University of Konstanz, HCI Group, Box D-73, 78457 Konstanz, Germany;University of Konstanz, HCI Group, Box D-73, 78457 Konstanz, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Human beings perceive their surroundings based on sensory information from diverse channels. However, for human-computer interaction we mostly restrict the user on visual perception. In this paper, we contribute to the investigation of tactile feedback as an additional perception modality. Therefore, we will first discuss existing user studies and provide a classification scheme for tactile feedback techniques. We will then present and discuss a comparative evaluation study based on the ISO 9241-9 [Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs) - Part 9: requirements for non-keyboard input devices, 2000]. The 20 participants performed horizontal and vertical one-directional tapping tasks with hand gesture input with and without tactile feedback in front of a large, high-resolution display. In contrast to previous research, we cannot confirm a benefit of tactile feedback on user performance. Our results show no significant effect in terms of throughput (effective index of performance (IPe)) and even a significant higher error rate for horizontal target alignment when using tactile feedback. Based on these results, we suggest that tactile feedback can interfere with other senses in a negative way, resulting in the observed higher error rate for horizontal targets. Therefore, more systematic research is needed to clarify the influencing factors on the usefulness of tactile feedback. Besides these results, we found a significant difference in favor of the horizontal target alignment compared with the vertical one in terms of the effective index of performance (IPe), confirming the work by Dennerlein et al. [Force feedback improves performance for steering and combined steering-targeting tasks, in: CHI '00: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2000, pp. 423-429].