Vibrotactile Feedback

© Robert Rosenkranz

The main goal of any design is to fullfill the user expectations in order to maximize the intuitive understandability as well as the perceived quality of the design. From such a perspective, the designer has the role of a translator inferring the phsyical product properties from the expectations of the user. Thus, the success of the designer is constrained by his expertise to correctly assess the expectations of the user as well as familiarity of the relationship between the physical product properties and the users perception.

To maximize the efficency of the design process it is therefore beneficial to quantify the user expectations. Since users are mostly laypersons, they cannot quantify their expectations in the form of physical vibration parameters such as level or frequency. Instead they can only provide verbal descriptions of their percepts. Therefore, we have assessed a standardized tactile design language in the IEEE Transactions on Haptics paper for the efficient tactile profiling of vibrations.

Such tactile profiles enable the model-based prediction of physical vibration parameters as demonstrated in IEEE World Haptics Conference. Together these tool enable a user driven design process that first quantifies users expectations and automatically predicts suitable vibration parameters to full such expectations.

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