The Benefits of Haptic Feedback in Mobile Phone Camera

Abstract

Communication is basically the act of transferring information from one place to another. Feedback is a system where the reaction or response of the receiver arrives at the sender after he/she has interpreted the message. Feedback is inevitably essential to make two way communications effective. In fact, without feedback communication remains incomplete. At times, feedback could be verbal such as written and oral. Then in some cases, it could be nonverbal. Feedback is mainly a response from your audiences; it allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your message. In fact research shows that the majority of the messages that have been sent are nonverbal and the ability to understand and use nonverbal communication is powerful tools that will help people connect with each other.

As well as communication where nonverbal shows much more impressive, a sense of touch as known as haptics plays an important role in our new phase of technology. It is the science of applying touch sensation and control to interaction with computer applications by using special input/output devices. It gives users a slight jolt of energy at the point of touch, providing instant sensory feedback, while reducing the audio, visual or audio-visual demand. Haptic technology is an evolutionary step into interacting with objects as an extension of our mind and allows for more socially appropriate and subtle interaction.

In this thesis, the benefits of haptic feedback in a mobile phone camera are explored and compared to the existing feedback mechanisms. Discovering expectations from users and gathering ideas in order to improve user experience in haptic feedback of a mobile phone camera will be the main focus as well as to understand “What make end users to use or not to use mobile phone camera?” and “What qualities of haptics could be used in the design of the user interface for mobile phone camera?”. Depending on the settings and the quality of the mobile phones, the feedback from the camera can affect the user experience in many ways. I believe that to improve the existing feedback by applying haptic output such as a vibration or a vibrotactile signal may also considerably improve the user experience. Because haptic feedback is a new technology and proved to be efficient, to apply it to the mobile phone camera feedback should provide better support for users when compared to the existing feedback signals, which are audio and visual only.

One of the main objectives was to analyze the users’ needs and expectations regarding the mobile phone camera haptic feedback and applications in various types of difficult situations and challenges users have encountered. Therefore, a user study was done at the beginning of the thesis work. Its aim was to get general results, which can be applied to haptic interaction on the mobile phone camera in order to improve existing applications and help easing users in their photo taking activities with their mobile phone camera. In addition, the results are considered to provide input for further studies as well as to offer concrete input to the development of a prototype.