Understanding the Perception of Vibrations and Designing Tactile Reading on Smartphones

The design of tactile interaction and tactile reading on mobile phones presents a number of challenges. In this paper, we present a quantization and coding model of tactile perception for developing efficient tactile reading systems. The model first quantifies the duration, interval and number of vibrations and then measures the ability of the user to perceive vibrations in experiments;next, it combines different vibration intervals and number of vibrations into code patterns, and finally, the model encodes different patterns of vibrations into characters. Based on the model, two kinds of tactile text coding schemes, a character index table and Morse code, were implemented. The experimental results showed that high reading speeds and accuracy, and user satisfaction were achieved with the proposed tactile coding schemes. Compared to traditional coding schemes based on Braille, the two proposed coding schemes were more effective for tactile reading. The proposed tactile coding model can be used effectively to design tactile interfaces and implement efficient tactile reading systems on mobile devices.