A Comparison of Two Wearable Tactile Interfaces with a Complementary Display in Two Orientations

Research has shown that two popular forms of wearable tactile displays, a back array and a waist belt, can aid pedestrian navigation by indicating direction. Each type has its proponents and each has been reported as successful in experimental trials, however, no direct experimental comparisons of the two approaches have been reported. We have therefore conducted a series of experiments directly comparing them on a range of measures. In this paper, we present results from a study in which we used a directional line drawing task to compare user performance with these two popular forms of wearable tactile display. We also investigated whether user performance was affected by a match between the plane of the tactile interface and the plane in which the users drew the perceived directions. Finally, we investigated the effect of adding a complementary visual display. The touch screen display on which participants drew the perceived directions presented either a blank display or a visual display of a map indicating eight directions from a central roundabout, corresponding to the eight directions indicated by the tactile stimuli. We found that participants performed significantly faster and more accurately with the belt than with the array whether they had a vertical screen or a horizontal screen. We found no difference in performance with the map display compared to the blank display.