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Involving multiple fingers in exploring a haptic surface: an evaluation study

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Abstract

In most haptic search tasks, tactile stimuli are usually presented to the fingers to discriminate simulated features and identify patterns. In this paper, we focus on a more complex exploration task in which users have to discriminate different stimuli, move their fingers in a free way to find and locate an object in a wider area of exploration and integrate all the perceived information to determine the position of the object. The study explores how users perform this haptic search task involving one or two fingers on a surface area. In order to carry out this research and overcome limitations of current hardware approaches to multi-point haptic surfaces, we used a setting consisting of a capacitive multi-touch screen and a general-purpose wearable vibrotactile device designed in our laboratory. The results indicate that using one finger in one hand shows to be more effective than using two fingers in either one or two hands in the task under study. Users showed higher confidence, lower exploration times, higher amount of right answers and higher exploration speed. This suggests that great efforts in providing independent multi-point haptic surface hardware could not be a priority for this kind of exploration task.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and by the FEDER funds of the EU under the project Grants insPIre (TIN2012-34003). Miguel Oliver holds an FPU scholarship (FPU13/03141) from the Spanish Government. We want to thank Dr. Jonatan Martinez for his valuable input and special support in hardware development and provision. Also thanks to Dr. Javier Jaen for his valuable comments during the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LoUISE Research Group, Computing Systems Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Avda, España s/n, 02071, Albacete, Spain

    Alejandro Catala, Miguel Oliver, Jose Pascual Molina & Pascual Gonzalez

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  1. Alejandro Catala
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  2. Miguel Oliver
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  3. Jose Pascual Molina
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  4. Pascual Gonzalez
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pascual Gonzalez.

Appendix

Appendix

This appendix shows the questions that participants had to answer in each trial.

figure e

  • Indicate your first option in the grid, which you believe to be the more likely configuration that you have just explored: __.

  • Rate the confidence in your answer: ___ (1\(\ldots \)10 =  very sure-confident).

  • Indicate your second chance answer if you are not completely sure and if you were allowed to correct your choice: ___.

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Catala, A., Oliver, M., Molina, J.P. et al. Involving multiple fingers in exploring a haptic surface: an evaluation study. Vis Comput 32, 921–932 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-016-1250-z

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