Development of augmented reality serious games with a vibrotactile feedback jacket

Background: In the past few years, augmented reality (AR) has rapidly advanced and has been applied in different fields. One of the successful AR applications is the immersive and interactive serious games, which can be used for education and learning purposes. Methods: In this project, a prototype of an AR serious game is developed and demonstrated. Gamers utilize a head-mounted device and a vibrotactile feedback jacket to explore and interact with the AR serious game. Fourteen vibration actuators are embedded in the vibrotactile feedback jacket to generate immersive AR experience. These vibration actuators are triggered in accordance with the designed game scripts. Various vibration patterns and intensity levels are synthesized in different game scenes. This article presents the details of the entire software development of the AR serious game, including game scripts, game scenes with AR effects design, signal processing flow, behavior design, and communication configuration. Graphics computations are processed using the graphics processing unit in the system. Results /Conclusions: The performance of the AR serious game prototype is evaluated and analyzed. The computation loads and resource utilization of normal game scenes and heavy computation scenes are compared. With 14 vibration actuators placed at different body positions, various vibration patterns and intensity levels can be generated by the vibrotactile feedback jacket, providing different real-world feedback. The prototype of this AR serious game can be valuable in building large-scale AR or virtual reality educational and entertainment games. Possible future improvements of the proposed prototype are also discussed in this article

Interaction Illustration Taxonomy: Classification of Styles and Techniques for Visually Representing Interaction Scenarios

International audienceStatic illustrations are ubiquitous means to represent interaction scenarios. Across papers and reports, these visuals demonstrate people's use of devices, explain systems, or show design spaces. Creating such figures is challenging, and very little is known about the overarching strategies for visually representing interaction scenarios. To mitigate this task, we contribute a unified taxonomy of design elements that compose such figures. In particular, we provide a detailed classification of Structural and Interaction strategies, such as composition, visual techniques, dynamics, representation of users, and many others-all in context of the type of scenarios. This taxonomy can inform researchers' choices when creating new figures, by providing a concise synthesis of visual strategies, and revealing approaches they were not aware of before. Furthermore, to support the community for creating further taxonomies, we also provide three open-source software facilitating the coding process and visual exploration of the coding scheme

Exploring Multimodal Watch-back Tactile Display using Wind and Vibration

A tactile display on the back of a smartwatch is an attractive output option; however, its channel capacity is limited owing to the small contact area. In order to expand the channel capacity, we considered using two perceptually distinct types of stimuli, wind and vibration, together on the same skin area. The result is a multimodal tactile display that combines wind and vibration to create "colored" tactile sensations on the wrist. As a first step toward this goal, we conducted in this study four user experiments with a wind-vibration tactile display to examine different ways of combining wind and vibration: Individual, Sequential, and Simultaneous. The results revealed the sequential combination of wind and vibration to exhibit the highest potential, with an information transfer capacity of 3.29 bits. In particular, the transition of tactile modality was perceived at an accuracy of 98.52%. The current results confirm the feasibility and potential of a multimodal tactile display combining wind and vibration