Where is my team: supporting situation awareness with tactile displays

A group of friends visiting a crowded and noisy music festival is an example of a situation where knowing the location of other people is important, but where external factors, such as darkness or noise, can limit the ability to keep track of the others. By combining theories about situation awareness and cognitive processing we inferred that communicating information via the sense of touch is a promising approach in such situations. We therefore investigated how to present the location of several people using a tactile torso display. In particular we focused on encoding spatial distances in the tactile signals. We experimentally compared encoding spatial distances in the rhythm, duration, and intensity of a tactile signal. Our findings show that all parameters are suited to encode distances. None of it was clearly outperformed. We then embedded our tactile location encoding into a fastpaced 3D multiplayer game. In this game, team play and the awareness of the team members’ locatio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Martin Pielot, Oliver Krull, Susanne Boll
• Keywords: CHI 2010, Human Computer Interaction, Situation Awareness, Tactile, Tactile Signal