Frictio: Passive Kinesthetic Force Feedback for Smart Ring Output

Abstract

Smart rings have a unique form factor suitable for many applications, however, they offer little opportunity to provide the user with natural output. We propose passive kinesthetic force feedback as a novel output method for rotational input on smart rings. With this new output channel, friction force profiles can be designed, programmed, and felt by a user when they rotate the ring. This modality enables new interactions for ring form factors. We demonstrate the potential of this new haptic output method though Frictio, a prototype smart ring. In a controlled experiment, we determined the recognizability of six force profiles, including Hard Stop, Ramp-Up, Ramp-Down, Resistant Force, Bump, and No Force. The results showed that participants could distinguish between the force profiles with 94% accuracy. We conclude by presenting a set of novel interaction techniques that Frictio enables, and discuss insights and directions for future research.

Video

Citation

Teng Han, Qian Han, Michelle Annett, Fraser Anderson, Da-Yuan Huang, and Xing-Dong Yang. 2017. Frictio: Passive Kinesthetic Force Feedback for Smart Ring Output. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 131-142. https://doi.org/10.1145/3126594.3126622