Haptic and Audio Displays for Augmented Reality Tourism Applications

Augmented Reality (AR) technology has potential for supporting applications such as tourism. However, non-visual interaction modalities are undervalued and underused in AR tourism applications. Visual displays are ineffective or inappropriate in some situations such as in strong sunlight or when walking or driving. Meanwhile, non-visual modalities are becoming increasingly important in mobile user experiences. In this paper, two non-visual interaction modalities, haptic display and audio display, and their combination are evaluated in representing tourism information to users with a mobile phone. An experimental evaluation was conducted with different tourism information presented by haptic display, audio display and both, with 3 different rhythms and 3 levels of amplitude. The results show a main effect of interaction modality, with identification rate highest for information represented in the combined Haptic-Audio display at 86.7%, while no significant effect was found for rhythm or amplitude alone. Qualitative data from the participants indicated that, across all interaction modalities, different levels of amplitude were more difficult to distinguish than different rhythms or different combinations of rhythm and amplitude.