Impact of haptic 'touching' technology on cultural applications

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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

Using non-speech sounds to provide navigation cues

This article describes 3 experiments that investigate the possibiity of using structured nonspeech audio messages called earcons to provide navigational cues in a menu hierarchy. A hierarchy of 27 nodes and 4 levels was created with an earcon for each node. Rules were defined for the creation of hierarchical earcons at each node. Participants had to identify their location in the hierarchy by listening to an earcon. Results of the first experiment showed that participants could identify their location with 81.5% accuracy, indicating that earcons were a powerful method of communicating hierarchy information. One proposed use for such navigation cues is in telephone-based interfaces (TBIs) where navigation is a problem. The first experiment did not address the particular problems of earcons in TBIs such as “does the lower quality of sound over the telephone lower recall rates,” “can users remember earcons over a period of time.” and “what effect does training type have on recall?” An experiment was conducted and results showed that sound quality did lower the recall of earcons. However; redesign of the earcons overcame this problem with 73% recalled correctly. Participants could still recall earcons at this level after a week had passed. Training type also affected recall. With personal training participants recalled 73% of the earcons, but with purely textual training results were significantly lower. These results show that earcons can provide good navigation cues for TBIs. The final experiment used compound, rather than hierarchical earcons to represent the hierarchy from the first experiment. Results showed that with sounds constructed in this way participants could recall 97% of the earcons. These experiments have developed our general understanding of earcons. A hierarchy three times larger than any previously created was tested, and this was also the first test of the recall of earcons over time

Web-based multimodal graphs for visually impaired people

This paper describes the development and evaluation of Web-based multimodal graphs designed for visually impaired and blind people. The information in the graphs is conveyed to visually impaired people through haptic and audio channels. The motivation of this work is to address problems faced by visually impaired people in accessing graphical information on the Internet, particularly the common types of graphs for data visualization. In our work, line graphs, bar charts and pie charts are accessible through a force feedback device, the Logitech WingMan Force Feedback Mouse. Pre-recorded sound files are used to represent graph contents to users. In order to test the usability of the developed Web graphs, an evaluation was conducted with bar charts as the experimental platform. The results showed that the participants could successfully use the haptic and audio features to extract information from the Web graphs

Multimodal virtual reality versus printed medium in visualization for blind people

In this paper, we describe a study comparing the strengths of a multimodal Virtual Reality (VR) interface against traditional tactile diagrams in conveying information to visually impaired and blind people. The multimodal VR interface consists of a force feedback device (SensAble PHANTOM), synthesized speech and non-speech audio. Potential advantages of the VR technology are well known however its real usability in comparison with the conventional paper-based medium is seldom investigated. We have addressed this issue in our evaluation. The experimental results show benefits from using the multimodal approach in terms of more accurate information about the graphs obtained by users

CHILDREN AIMED INTERFACES FOR ANDROID RUNNING DEVICES

The paper focuses on the development of mobile interfaces for children. The Android operating system is presented from appearance with its features, hardware support and its advantages over others operating systems. Mobile software development requirements on different platforms for mobile devices are identified and described. A graphical interface aiming children is designed and its features are presented. The interface includes an application for managing the school related tasks and time. Children manage the time of the days of the week differently. They have access to a task management system and a progress reporting tool. The advantages and development requirements are identified and discussed.mobile, software, development, Android, devices, interfaces, children

Ambient Gestures

We present Ambient Gestures, a novel gesture-based system designed to support ubiquitous ‘in the environment’ interactions with everyday computing technology. Hand gestures and audio feedback allow users to control computer applications without reliance on a graphical user interface, and without having to switch from the context of a non-computer task to the context of the computer. The Ambient Gestures system is composed of a vision recognition software application, a set of gestures to be processed by a scripting application and a navigation and selection application that is controlled by the gestures. This system allows us to explore gestures as the primary means of interaction within a multimodal, multimedia environment. In this paper we describe the Ambient Gestures system, define the gestures and the interactions that can be achieved in this environment and present a formative study of the system. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and future applications of Ambient Gestures in ubiquitous computing

Parallel earcons: reducing the length of audio messages

This paper describes a method of presenting structured audio messages, earcons, in parallel so that they take less time to play and can better keep pace with interactions in a human-computer interface. The two component parts of a compound earcon are played in parallel so that the time taken is only that of a single part. An experiment was conducted to test the recall and recognition of parallel compound earcons as compared to serial compound earcons. Results showed that there are no differences in the rates of recognition between the two groups. Non-musicians are also shown to be equal in performance to musicians. Some extensions to the earcon creation guidelines of Brewster, Wright and Edwards are put forward based upon research into auditory stream segregation. Parallel earcons are shown to be an effective means of increasing the presentation rates of audio messages without compromising recognition rates