Raising Awareness about Space via Vibro-Tactile Notifications

Human perception, in a world of continuous and seamless exposure to visual and auditory stimuli, is increasingly challenged to information overload. Among the primary human senses, vision, audition and tactation, particularly the sense of touch appears underemployed in todays designs of interfaces that deliver information to the user. While about more than 70% of the information perceived by humans is delivered via the sight and hearing channel, only about 21% is perceived via the haptic sense. In situations of work or engaged activity, where both the visual and auditory channel are occupied because of the involvement in the foreground task, notifications or alerts coming from the background, and delivered via these channels tend to fail to raise sufficient levels of attention. With this paper we propose to involve the haptic channel for situations where important notifications tend to be "overseen" or "overheard". We opt for a vibro-tactile notification system when...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: EUROSSC
• Authors: Andreas Riener, Alois Ferscha
• Keywords: Auditory Stimuli, EUROSSC 2008, Human Perception, Information Management, Primary Human Senses