Comments posted on Jill's Blog and Chris's blog.
Touch screens are present on most new mobile devices. While they are good and useful, you must be looking at the screen to know if you have touched the right button. Recently, makers of mobile devices have been experimenting with vibration to inform a user when he or she is pressing a button on the screen. In their paper, Koji Yatani and Khai Truong experiment with using multiple vibrating actuators in a mobile device to inform the user of which button he or she is pressing.
SemFeel is a sleeve developed to fit on a mobile device that has five vibrating actuators. One in the middle, top, bottom, left and right. Using these actuators, eleven different patterns of vibration were able to be produced. One at each of the actuators, one going left to right and vice versa, one going up to down and vice versa, one going clockwise and another going counterclockwise. Experiments with each of these patterns showed that users were easily able to recognize all of the patterns except for counterclockwise.
One of the tests required users to enter four digit numbers on the mobile device without looking at the screen of the mobile device. Testers that used SemFeel completed the tests far more accurately than those that used a mobile device with only one or no vibrating actuators.
I think that this device would be very useful. Even when I use my Ipod, I always press the wrong button when I don't look at my screen. A device like this would help me know whether or not I'm pressing the right button. I don't like the fact that you have to put this large sleeve on the device to get it to work. I would try to find a way to integrate the SemFeel system into the device itself.
As someone who does in fact use a device that responds by vibration to touch commands, I get the idea behind this. My insulin pump has a tone and a vibrate feature and I use the vibrate. Whenever you do something important it vibrates. Even though there is a screen showing what you're doing, some things I can do at this point without looking. I don't know if I'd prefer my other devices to vibrate though. :/
ReplyDeleteYeah I wonder how often people would really need to use a touch-screen device without looking at it. And if they really need to, it probably means that they're driving or something and really shouldn't be using it anyway.
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