Telling Time by Vibration

Abstract

Touch is an important and often underutilized sense in human-computer interaction. For those with hearing or seeing impairments, touch becomes even more important and may be the only suitable communication channel. Touch can also be used to convey information discreetly. Also time plays a crucial role in our daily lives and therefore telling the time is very important. The two main subjects of this thesis are touch and time. Some applications where time is communicated with a vibrotactile signal have been developed, but the information about them is scarce.

This brings up two questions: How to communicate the time with vibrotactile signals and can people understand the signals without training? This is why a method to present time with vibrotactile pulse sequences has been developed in this thesis. Therefore the main subject of this thesis is vibrotactile communication and more specifically: time and vibrotactile communication. Two experiments were conducted which reveal how the method performs. The tests were conducted in order to find out how accurately people can read time from simple sequences of vibration, and how does training affect the recognition rate. The thesis also contains a brief overview of sense of touch, vibrotactility and time. The results reveal that the method is viable and users are able to decode the time correctly with relatively good performance.

Keywords and terms: vibration, time, haptic, tactile, mobile phone, vibrotactile, tacton,

clock, watch, temporal vibrotactile sequences