Designing audio and tactile crossmodal icons for mobile devices

This paper reports an experiment into the design of crossmodal icons which can provide an alternative form of output for mobile devices using audio and tactile modalities to communicate information. A complete set of crossmodal icons was created by encoding three dimensions of information in three crossmodal auditory/tactile parameters. Earcons were used for the audio and Tactons for the tactile crossmodal icons. The experiment investigated absolute identification of audio and tactile crossmodal icons when a user is trained in one modality and tested in the other (and given no training in the other modality) to see if knowledge could be transferred between modalities. We also compared performance when users were static and mobile to see any effects that mobility might have on recognition of the cues. The results showed that if participants were trained in sound with Earcons and then tested with the same messages presented via Tactons they could recognize 85% of messages when stationar...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICMI
• Authors: Eve E. Hoggan, Stephen A. Brewster
• Keywords: Crossmodal Icons, ICMI 2007, Tactile Crossmodal Icons, Tactile Modalities