Document

Author
Eddie Brown, David R. Large, Hannah Limerick, William Frier & Gary Burnett
Abstract
Mid-air haptic technology has enabled a new research arena in spatial interaction to emerge. Various efforts have attempted to pair mid-air haptics with gestural input for In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems but have not explored the higher reaches of semiotic information transfer during these interactions. Building on a participatory design study in which participants’ metaphors for seven infotainment features were “haptified”, twenty-five participants were recruited to evaluate the perceptual efficacy of the sixteen resulting mid-air haptic icons. Four perception metrics (Instant Identification, Recognition Rate, Instant Articulatory Directness and Distinguishability) were collected through stimulus matching and descriptive tasks. The haptic icons which offered the best saliency (i.e. received the highest cumulative scores for all four metrics) were subsequently selected to represent their respective features in a prototype Mid-Air Haptic Gesture Interface, which will be evaluated in further, ongoing work. The study highlights an important stage in the development and deployment of semiotic mid-air haptics for gestural interfaces.