Design and Effect of Continuous Wearable Tactile Displays

Our sense of touch is one of our core senses and while not as information rich as sight and hearing, it tethers us to reality. Our skin is the largest sensory organ in our body and we rely on it so much that we don\u27t think about it most of the time. Tactile displays - with the exception of actuators for notifications on smartphones and smartwatches - are currently understudied and underused. Currently tactile cues are mostly used in smartphones and smartwatches to notify the user of an incoming call or text message. Specifically continuous displays - displays that do not just send one notification but stay active for an extended period of time and continuously communicate information - are rarely studied. This thesis aims at exploring the utilization of our vibration perception to create continuous tactile displays. Transmitting a continuous stream of tactile information to a user in a wearable format can help elevate tactile displays from being mostly used for notifications to becoming more like additional senses enabling us to perceive our environment in new ways. This work provides a serious step forward in design, effect and use of continuous tactile displays and their use in human-computer interaction. The main contributions include: Exploration of Continuous Wearable Tactile Interfaces This thesis explores continuous tactile displays in different contexts and with different types of tactile information systems. The use-cases were explored in various domains for tactile displays - Sports, Gaming and Business applications. The different types of continuous tactile displays feature one- or multidimensional tactile patterns, temporal patterns and discrete tactile patterns. Automatic Generation of Personalized Vibration Patterns In this thesis a novel approach of designing vibrotactile patterns without expert knowledge by leveraging evolutionary algorithms to create personalized vibration patterns - is described. This thesis presents the design of an evolutionary algorithm with a human centered design generating abstract vibration patterns. The evolutionary algorithm was tested in a user study which offered evidence that interactive generation of abstract vibration patterns is possible and generates diverse sets of vibration patterns that can be recognized with high accuracy. Passive Haptic Learning for Vibration Patterns Previous studies in passive haptic learning have shown surprisingly strong results for learning Morse Code. If these findings could be confirmed and generalized, it would mean that learning a new tactile alphabet could be made easier and learned in passing. Therefore this claim was investigated in this thesis and needed to be corrected and contextualized. A user study was conducted to study the effects of the interaction design and distraction tasks on the capability to learn stimulus-stimulus-associations with Passive Haptic Learning. This thesis presents evidence that Passive Haptic Learning of vibration patterns induces only a marginal learning effect and is not a feasible and efficient way to learn vibration patterns that include more than two vibrations. Influence of Reference Frames for Spatial Tactile Stimuli Designing wearable tactile stimuli that contain spatial information can be a challenge due to the natural body movement of the wearer. An important consideration therefore is what reference frame to use for spatial cues. This thesis investigated allocentric versus egocentric reference frames on the wrist and compared them for induced cognitive load, reaction time and accuracy in a user study. This thesis presents evidence that using an allocentric reference frame drastically lowers cognitive load and slightly lowers reaction time while keeping the same accuracy as an egocentric reference frame, making a strong case for the utilization of allocentric reference frames in tactile bracelets with several tactile actuators

Investigate the Piano Learning Rate with Haptic Actuators in Mixed Reality

With mixed reality (MR) becoming widely available, it could enhance learning because special equipment like musical instruments or access to instructors will be less of a concern. Furthermore, passive haptic learning systems to learn piano are promising research subjects. We combine both trends of MR and haptic learning to build a piano learning application. Through a study with diverse participants, we evaluate the piano application. The study results show the potentiality of the on-skin actuators and we hope our work could foster the future iterations of the actuators for a fun and effective learning environment

DragTapVib: An On-Skin Electromagnetic Drag, Tap, and Vibration Actuator for Wearable Computing

The skin, as the largest organ distributed all over the human body, offers excellent opportunities for different kinds of input stimuli. However, most of the haptic devices can only render single sensations or they need to combine multiple complex components for generating multiple sensations. We present “DragTapVib” in this paper, a novel, ultra-low-cost, wearable actuator that can reliably provide dragging, tapping, and vibrating sensations to the user. Our actuator is fully electromagnetically-actuated with a moving tactor that can render three haptic feedbacks through systematically controlling the current inside the flexible PCBs. The actuator can be arranged with varying parts of the body which enriches the potentials to implement promising application scenarios including delivering the notification and providing immersive haptic feedback either in virtual reality or in gameplay. A prototypical technical evaluation demonstrated the mechanical properties of our actuator. We quantitatively conducted a series of psychophysical user studies (N= 12) to reveal the feasibility of our prototype. The overall absolute identification study for distinguishing three sensations accuracy at two body locations reached up to 97.2%

Ubiquitäre Systeme (Seminar) und Mobile Computing (Proseminar) WS 2016/17. Mobile und Verteilte Systeme. Ubiquitous Computing. Teil XIV

Diese Arbeit wird einen Überblick über virtuelle intelligente Assistenten (VIA), die im deutschen auch oft als Sprachassistenten bezeichnet werden, geben. Es werden die verschiedenen Arten von VIA gezeigt und in welchem Zusammenhang sie momentan schon genutzt werden. Als Beispiel werden einige aktuelle Assistenten dienen. Zudem werden neben den Möglichkeiten der Programme, auch noch die Grenzen dieser Technik dargestellt und mögliche Verbesserungen und Optimierungen für die Zukunft besprochen. Ebenfalls wird das empfindliche Thema Datenschutz mit Bezug auf die VIA behandelt. Am Ende des zweiten Teils gehen wir auf die aktuelle Beliebtheit und Nutzung der Anwendungen ein. Im dritten Abschnitt wird dann die Funktionsweise der Software im Hintergrund der Assistenten betrachtet. Es wird der allgemeine Aufbau eines VIA skizziert. Zudem werden zwei Modelle für die Arbeitsweise der Sprachassistenten betrachtet. Dazu werden auch einige theoretische Konzepte wie Ontologien, Knowledge Graphen und POMDP (partially observable Markov decision process) beleuchtet. Zum Schluss kommt ein Fazit über die weitere Entwicklung der VIA mit Überlegungen für Verbesserungen und Optimierungen

Ubiquitäre Systeme (Seminar) und Mobile Computing (Proseminar) SS 2019 : Mobile und Verteilte Systeme Ubiquitous Computing. Teil XIX

Die Seminarreihe Mobile Computing und Ubiquitäre Systeme existiert seit dem Wintersemester 2013/2014. Seit diesem Semester findet das Proseminar Mobile Computing am Lehrstuhl fur Pervasive Computing System statt. Die Arbeiten des Proseminars werden seit dem mit den Arbeiten des zweiten Seminars des Lehrstuhls, dem Seminar Ubiquitäre Systeme, zusammengefasst und gemeinsam veröffentlicht. Die Seminarreihe Ubiquitäre Systeme hat eine lange Tradition in der Forschungsgruppe TECO. Im Wintersemester 2010/2011 wurde die Gruppe Teil des Lehrstuhls für Pervasive Computing Systems. Seit dem findet das Seminar Ubiquitäre Systeme in jedem Semester statt. Ebenso wird das Proseminar Mobile Computing seit dem Wintersemester 2013/2014 in jedem Semester durchgeführt. Seit dem Wintersemester 2003/2004 werden die Seminararbeiten als KIT-Berichte veröffentlicht. Ziel der gemeinsamen Seminarreihe ist die Aufarbeitung und Diskussion aktueller Forschungsfragen in den Bereichen Mobile und Ubiquitous Computing. Dieser Seminarband fasst die Arbeiten der Seminare des Sommersemesters 2019 zusammen. Wir danken den Studierenden für ihren besonderen Einsatz, sowohl während des Seminars als auch bei der Fertigstellung dieses Bandes

GenVibe: Exploration of Interactive Generation of Personal Vibrotactile Patterns

Research about vibrotactile patterns is traditionally conducted with patterns handcrafted by experts which are then subsequently evaluated in general user studies. The current empirical approach to designing vibrotactile patterns mostly utilizes expert decisions and is notably not adapted to individual differences in the perception of vibration. This work describes GenVibe: a novel approach to designing vibrotactile patterns by examining the automatic generation of personal patterns. GenVibe adjusts patterns to the perception of an individual through the utilization of interactive generative models. An algorithm is described and tested with a dummy smartphone made from off-the-shelf electronic components. Afterward, a user study with 11 participants evaluates the outcome of GenVibe. Results show a significant increase in accuracy from 73.6% to 84.0% and a higher confidence ratings by the users