Feel who's talking

Abstract

While the sense of touch is capable of processing complex stimuli, the vibration feedback used in mobile phones is generally very simple. Using more complex vibrotactile messages would enable the communication of more information through phone alerts, however it has been suggested that phone vibration motors are not capable of presenting complex messages. This paper reports a study investigating the use of Tactons (tactile icons), presented using a standard mobile phone vibration motor, to represent mobile phone alerts. The recognition rate of 72% achieved for Tactons encoding two pieces of information is comparable to results achieved in a previous experiment with a high specification transducer, indicating that it is possible to communicate multi-dimensional information in mobile phone alerts. These results will help designers to understand the possibilities offered by standard phone vibration motors for communicating complex information.