Abstract
Technological advances enable the capture and management of complex data sets that need to be correctly understood. Visualisation techniques can help in complex data analysis and exploration, but sometimes the visual channel is not enough, or it is not always available. Some authors propose using the haptic channel to reinforce or substitute the visual sense, but the limited human haptic short-term memory still poses a challenge. We present the haptic tuning fork, a reference signal displayed before the haptic information for increasing the discriminability of haptic icons. With this reference, the user does not depend only on short-term memory. We have decided to evaluate the usefulness of the haptic tuning fork in impedance kinesthetic devices as these are the most common. Furthermore, since the renderable signal ranges are device-dependent, we introduce a methodology to select a discriminable set of signals called the haptic scale. Both the haptic tuning fork and the haptic scale proved their usefulness in the performed experiments regarding haptic stimuli varying in frequency.
Highlights
The scientific community must confront large volumes of increasingly complex data, making difficult their analysis
We explain how to order the haptic icons to create haptic scales and we introduce the concept of the haptic tuning fork
We introduce the concepts of the haptic tuning fork and haptic scale in its wider sense, in this paper, we will focus on the procedure to obtain frequency-based haptic scales since, according to MacLean et al [32], the expressive capability is maximised in the frequency subspace
Summary
The scientific community must confront large volumes of increasingly complex data, making difficult their analysis. This need has promoted an increasing development of scientific visualisation techniques based on the use of the visual channel [1,2,3,4]. A large number of visual stimuli can saturate the sense of sight [5]. For this reason, rendering multisensory information can be of great help when exploring the data. We suggest a new technique to facilitate the use of other sensory channels, in particular the haptic sense, to help in the analysis of complex data. Our technique can be used either alone or to reinforce or supplement the visual information
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