A Haptic Back Display for Attentional and Directional Cueing

We have been developing a haptic back display using a 3-by-3 tactor array. This paper reports two studies that investigated the use of such a display for delivering attention- and direction-related information to its user. The first study measured the effectiveness of haptic cues in redirecting an observer's visual spatial attention. The observer was first tapped on the back, and then asked to detect a change between two similar visual scenes. We found that reaction time decreased by an average of 41% when the location of the tactor coincided with the quadrant of the visual scene where a change occurred. We also found that reaction time increased by an average of 19% when the locations of the tapping and visual change did not coincide. Such a haptic attentional cueing system can be beneficial to a user who must attend to information in small areas within a large and complex visual display (e.g. an aircraft cockpit). In the second study, sequenced pulses were employed to impart directional information. We found that native and minimally-trained observers were able to discern the directions of a set of horizontal, vertical and diagonal directional lines with an overall accuracy of 81%. Means of improving the overall accuracy were suggested and tested. These directional lines can be applied to a haptic navigation guidance or situation awareness system