Audio-haptic feedback in mobile phones

Abstract

A new breed of mobile phones has been designed to enable concurrent vibration and audio stimulation, or audio-haptics. This paper aims to share techniques for creating and optimizing audio-haptic effects to enhance the user interface.The authors present audio manipulation techniques specific to the multifunction transducer (MFT) technology. In particular two techniques, the Haptic Inheritance and Synthesis and Matching methods are discussed. These two methods of haptic media generation allow simple creation of vibration content, and also allow for compatibility with non-haptic mobile devices.The authors present preliminary results of an evaluation of 42 participants comparing audio-based haptic user interface (UI) feedback with audio-only feedback. The results show that users were receptive to audio-haptic UI feedback. The results also suggest that audio-haptics seems to enhance the perception of audio quality.