LAUSR

The use of the haptic channel in multimodal interfaces holds several advantages for communication, one of them being that it allows decreasing the load of the visual and auditory channels. Tactons are abstract messages that can be used to communicate non-visually. In this paper we describe a study in which we tested if a set of four tactons can be used to convey a risk level (four states) through an enactive shoe. To this end, two experiments have been run. In the first experiment with 14 participants, we used a multidimensional scale analysis to identify the six most different tactons from an initial set of 30 tactons. In the second experiment (with 38 participants), we evaluated participants’ ability to recognize four preselected tactons among these six. For each trial, participants had to perform 12 identifications (three times for each tacton) until they reached a score greater than 95%. The number of trials required and the completion time are analyzed. We found that the repetition significantly improves the recognition rate of tactons but does not speed up the completion time.