HCI 09: Interaction goes touchy-feely - haptics, vibration and blindfolds

After lurking at the periphery of interface design for many years, haptics – touch-based technology – seems to have come back into fashion. Gone are the large, smudgy and unreliable touch screens, replaced by accurate and sensitive devices which translate physical contacts into meaningful digital representations. Of course screens are still important, but nowadays it’s the screens of mobile devices. Immersion Corp focuses on mobile haptics which includes a huge range of clicks, pushes, buzzes and clunks, undoubtedly meeting the company’s claim offer certainty of response and a richer interaction. The usability benefits include reduced cognitive load and reduced glance time – which don’t sound significant until you try them.

Skin is clearly a legitimate mediator of touch, and vibrotactile feedback is the current flavour du jour. The research on offer combined clunky physical devices bristling with solenoids, wires and velcro, and profound philosophical musings on the nature of the extended mind and the ease with which we are able to substitute one sensory modality for another. Simpler applications included a wrist band and chest belt which monitor running speed during exercise, increasing or decreasing the intensity of vibration depending on how far the runner strays outside a set rate. Also on show was Simon Robinson's handheld device which, when appropriately preprogrammed with geo-tagged information, provided directional vibrations and images of a nearby artefact, enabling users to navigate their way around an environment in a more ‘heads-up’ way.

For sheer public appeal, however, the ‘low-fi skin vision’ project proved the most compelling, with prospective participants queueing down the corridor at the Open House Festival to try out the prototype. The brainchild of Dr Jon Bird and Dr Paul Marshall, both of the Open University e-sense project, skin vision converts visual and motor stimuli into vibrotactile feedback which is mapped onto specific areas of the skin, enabling users effectively to ‘see’ with their skin. Even when blindfolded, just a few practice runs were sufficient for most participants to catch a ball rolling towards them from a range of directions, including a diagonal trajectory and at varying speeds. While the cumbersome belt and glove limit the device’s usefulness (remember, the prototype is low-fi), it was a powerful demonstration of the phenomenon of sensory substitution and the relative ease with which most of us are able to switch between modalities without losing that much information.

As discussed in their paper, also presented at HCI 09, Bird and Marshall now plan to extend use of the system to conduct novel experiments into sensory substitution that will potentially inform the philosophical questions motivating the research. These include an investigation into the relationship between two sensory modalities to explore what, exactly, it is which allows one to act as a substitute for the other. Given the remarkable capacity of most people to adapt to changes in existing sensorimotor mappings and to incorporate novel sensory modalities, the researchers ask, under what conditions would a sensory substitution technology be most and least suitable? Another, more speculative, goal is to generate novel insights into the 'extended mind'. This philosophical perspective argues that “the mind is less and less in the head” and that human cognition emerges from a hybrid of biological and non-biological components (including external representations and technologies) - effectively, the functions performed by the mind need not be in the head, or even the body. This viewpoint has profound implications for our notion of what it means to be human, suggesting that using new technologies can potentially change a person’s thoughts and actions more profoundly than you might expect.

Associated Link: The e-sense project: novel augmentation devices to explore sensory, bodily and cognitive extension

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