An Evaluation of Input Controls for In-Car Interactions

The way drivers operate in-car systems is rapidly changing as traditional physical controls, such as buttons and dials, are being replaced by touchscreens and touch-sensing surfaces. This has the potential to increase driver distraction and error as controls may be harder to find and use. This paper presents an in-car, on the road driving study which examined three key types of input controls to investigate their effects: a physical dial, pressure-based input on a touch surface and touch input on a touchscreen. The physical dial and pressure-based input were also evaluated with and without haptic feedback. The study was conducted with users performing a list-based targeting task using the different controls while driving on public roads. Eye-gaze was recorded to measure distraction from the primary task of driving. The results showed that target accuracy was high across all input methods (greater than 94%). Pressure-based targeting was the slowest while directly tapping on the targets was the faster selection method. Pressure-based input also caused the largest number of glances towards to the touchscreen but the duration of each glance was shorter than directly touching the screen. Our study will enable designers to make more appropriate design choices for future in-car interactions

An Evaluation of Touch and Pressure-Based Scrolling and Haptic Feedback for In-car Touchscreens

An in-car study was conducted to examine different input techniques for list-based scrolling tasks and the effectiveness of haptic feedback for in-car touchscreens. The use of physical switchgear on centre consoles is decreasing which allows designers to develop new ways to interact with in-car applications. However, these new methods need to be evaluated to ensure they are usable. Therefore, three input techniques were tested: direct scrolling, pressure-based scrolling and scrolling using onscreen buttons on a touchscreen. The results showed that direct scrolling was less accurate than using onscreen buttons and pressure input, but took almost half the time when compared to the onscreen buttons and was almost three times quicker than pressure input. Vibrotactile feedback did not improve input performance but was preferred by the users. Understanding the speed vs. accuracy trade-off between these input techniques will allow better decisions when designing safer in-car interfaces for scrolling applications

Model-based target sonification on mobile devices

We investigate the use of audio and haptic feedback to augment the display of a mobile device controlled by tilt input. We provide an example of this based on Doppler effects, which highlight the user's approach to a target, or a target's movement from the current state, in the same way we hear the pitch of a siren change as it passes us. Twelve participants practiced navigation/browsing a state-space that was displayed via audio and vibrotactile modalities. We implemented the experiment on a Pocket PC, with an accelerometer attached to the serial port and a headset attached to audio port. Users navigated through the environment by tilting the device. Feedback was provided via audio displayed via a headset, and by vibrotactile information displayed by a vibrotactile unit in the Pocket PC. Users selected targets placed randomly in the state-space, supported by combinations of audio, visual and vibrotactile cues. The speed of target acquisition and error rate were measured, and summary statistics on the acquisition trajectories were calculated. These data were used to compare different display combinations and configurations. The results in the paper quantified the changes brought by predictive or 'quickened' sonified displays in mobile, gestural interaction

Tactons: structured tactile messages for non-visual information display

Tactile displays are now becoming available in a form that can be easily used in a user interface. This paper describes a new form of tactile output. Tactons, or tactile icons, are structured, abstract messages that can be used to communicate messages non-visually. A range of different parameters can be used for Tacton construction including: frequency, amplitude and duration of a tactile pulse, plus other parameters such as rhythm and location. Tactons have the potential to improve interaction in a range of different areas, particularly where the visual display is overloaded, limited in size or not available, such as interfaces for blind people or in mobile and wearable devices. This paper describes Tactons, the parameters used to construct them and some possible ways to design them. Examples of where Tactons might prove useful in user interfaces are given

Teleoperating a mobile manipulator and a free-flying camera from a single haptic device

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThe paper presents a novel teleoperation system that allows the simultaneous and continuous command of a ground mobile manipulator and a free flying camera, implemented using an UAV, from which the operator can monitor the task execution in real-time. The proposed decoupled position and orientation workspace mapping allows the teleoperation from a single haptic device with bounded workspace of a complex robot with unbounded workspace. When the operator is reaching the position and orientation boundaries of the haptic workspace, linear and angular velocity components are respectively added to the inputs of the mobile manipulator and the flying camera. A user study on a virtual environment has been conducted to evaluate the performance and the workload on the user before and after proper training. Analysis on the data shows that the system complexity is not an obstacle for an efficient performance. This is a first step towards the implementation of a teleoperation system with a real mobile manipulator and a low-cost quadrotor as the free-flying camera.Accepted versio

Quantifying perception of nonlinear elastic tissue models using multidimensional scaling

Simplified soft tissue models used in surgical simulations cannot perfectly reproduce all material behaviors. In particular, many tissues exhibit the Poynting effect, which results in normal forces during shearing of tissue and is only observed in nonlinear elastic material models. In order to investigate and quantify the role of the Poynting effect on material discrimination, we performed a multidimensional scaling (MDS) study. Participants were presented with several pairs of shear and normal forces generated by a haptic device during interaction with virtual soft objects. Participants were asked to rate the similarity between the forces felt. The selection of the material parameters – and thus the magnitude of the shear\ud and normal forces – was based on a pre-study prior to the MDS experiment. It was observed that for nonlinear elastic tissue models exhibiting the Poynting effect, MDS analysis indicated that both shear and normal forces affect user perception

A first investigation into the effectiveness of Tactons

This paper reports two experiments relating to the design of Tactons (or tactile icons). The first experiment investigated perception of vibro-tactile "roughness" (created using amplitude modulated sinusoids), and the results indicated that roughness could be used as a parameter for constructing Tactons. The second experiment is the first full evaluation of Tactons, and uses three values of roughness identified in the first experiment, along with three rhythms to create a set of Tactons. The results of this experiment showed that Tactons could be a successful means of communicating information in user interfaces, with an overall recognition rate of 71%, and recognition rates of 93% for rhythm and 80% for roughness