Ambient touch: designing tactile interfaces for handheld devices

  • Authors:

  • Ivan Poupyrev;Shigeaki Maruyama;Jun Rekimoto

  • Affiliations:

  • Interaction Lab, Sony CSL, 3-14-13 Higashigotanda, Shinagawa Tokyo;Micro Device Center, Sony EMCS, 2-15-3 Konan, Minato-ku Tokyo;Interaction Lab, Sony CSL, 3-14-13 Higashigotanda, Shinagawa Tokyo

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This paper investigates the sense of touch as a channel for communicating with miniature handheld devices. We embedded a PDA with a TouchEngineTM --- 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.