INFORMATION TRANSFER OF PROGRAMMABLE BUTTON
with augmented vibrotactile sensations
Vibration-Augmented Buttons: Information Transmission Capacity and Application to Interaction Design
ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'22)
ABSTRACT
One can embed a vibration actuator to a physical button and augment the physical button’s original kinesthetic response with a programmable vibration generated by the actuator. Such vibration-augmented buttons inherit the advantages of both physical and virtual buttons. This paper reports the information transmission capacity of vibration-augmented buttons. It was obtained by conducting a series of absolute identification experiments while increasing the number of augmented buttons. The information transmission capacity found was 2.6 bits, and vibration-augmented and physical buttons showed similar abilities in rendering easily recognizable haptic responses. In addition, we showcase a VR text entry application that utilizes vibration-augmented buttons. Our method provides several error messages to the user during text entry using a VR controller that includes an augmented button. We validate that the variable haptic feedback improves task performance, cognitive workload, and user experience for a transcription task.
FULL CITATION
Chaeyong Park, Jeongwoo Kim, Dong-Geun Kim, Seungjae Oh, and Seungmoon Choi. 2022. Vibration-Augmented Buttons: Information Transmission Capacity and Application to Interaction Design. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 435, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501849
FIGURES
(Teaser) Concept of vibration-augmented buttons. A vibra-tion actuator is embedded in a physical button. Upon detecting a keypress, a vibration is generated by the actuator and added to the original kinesthetic response of the physical button. As a result, the user perceives both kinesthetic (force and displacement) and tactile cues (vibration).
Augmented button replicated from our previous work. The button is 51 mm x 25 mm x 55 mm in size and 55 g in weight. The button cap has 17.5 mm of contact diameter and 6.6 mm of height.
(Left) 20 vibration signals used for button augmentation. The vibrations marked with upper-right color-coded labels were used in the IT estimation experiment. Each number indicates the experimental condition in which the vibration was used. (Right) Afective space of the 20 augmented buttons. Button B1–B7 are physical buttons shown for reference. The same color codes from the left vibration table are used.
Estimated IT values (colored bars) and maximum IT values (gray bars) for four button sets. Error bars represent standard errors.
Eight physical buttons used in Experiment 2.
Confusion matrix of eight physical buttons (Experiment 2).
(VR Applicatioins & Experiment 3) VR controller with a vibration-augmented button.
(VR Application) State machine for our VR text entry system using vibration-augmented buttons. Each transition arrow is labeled with the system message (input) and the augmented button (output).
(Results of Experiment 3) Words per minutes (WPM) and error rates.
(Results of Experiment 3) Cognitive workload measured using NASA-TLX (left) and user experience metrics (right). Signifcant diferences are represented with asterisks (∗∗ :0.001 < p < 0.01, ∗∗∗ : p < 0.001).