| Summary: | Haptic icons (brief, tactile stimuli with associated meanings) are a useful new way to
convey information through the modality of touch, but they are difficult to create because
of our lack of understanding into what makes good haptic stimuli and how people will
perceive them. This thesis aims to enlarge our capabilities to design and evaluate haptic
icons, despite these problems. We seek to do this via two overlapping threads of research.
In the first thread, we introduce the design parameter of rhythm as a means of extending
the expressive capabilities of the simple tactile stimuli used in haptic icons. This allows
us to create a set of expressive and perceptually distinguishable haptic stimuli larger by
almost an order of magnitude than any previously created. In the second thread of
research, we tackle the problem of how to evaluate the perceptual characteristics of such
a large set of stimuli with real people. We develop a means of evaluation that allows us to
collect perceived difference data by present each user with only a subset of the total
stimulus collection, and then stitch together an aggregate picture of how the stimuli are
perceived via data collected from overlapping subsets from different users.
To advance these two threads of research, two user studies are run in order to examine
how our haptic stimulus set is perceived and to validate our new method of gathering
perceptual difference data. One study uses an established but cumbersome technique to
study our stimulus set, and finds that haptic rhythms are perceived according to several
different aspects of rhythm, and that users can consistently differentiate between haptic
stimuli along these aspects. The second study uses our newly developed data collection
method to study the same stimulus set, and we find that the new technique produces
results that show no significant difference from the established technique, but using a
data collection task that is much quicker and less arduous for users to perform. We
conclude by recommending the use of our new haptic stimulus set and evaluation
technique as a powerful and viable means of extending the use of haptic icons to larger
sets. === Science, Faculty of === Computer Science, Department of === Graduate
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