Eyes-Free Graph Legibility: Using Skin-Dragging to Provide a Tactile Graph Visualization on the Arm

Abstract

Recent technological advances have enabled novel tactile displays which have mainly focused on providing shorter sensations for notifications and/or simple messages. These have been primarily been used to enhance the user experience. In contrast, conveying information via data charts, such as a line graph, remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we developed a tactile display prototype. Our prototype uses skin-dragging, a method to produce longer tactile perceptions from dragging a tip on the skin, as the primary means to convey the data. We postulate that if such an approach is successful, it could convey the data in eyes-free scenarios, an element common for on-the-go computing. In an experiment (n=12), we compare the recognition performance of graphs with two different skin-dragging properties, Full-Drag and Dot. The results show that participants performed both techniques equally well, but our Full-Drag technique was greatly preferred. We conclude with design guidelines for tactile displays that focus on graph representations.

Publisher Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/3396339.3396344

Citation

Sandra Bardot, Sawyer Rempel, Bradley Rey, Ali Neshati, Yumiko Sakamoto, Carlo Menon and Pourang Irani. 2020. Eyes-Free Graph Legibility: Using Skin-Dragging to Provide a Tactile Graph Visualization on the Arm. In 11th Augmented Human International Conference (AH ’20), May 27–29, 2020, Winnipeg, MB, Canada. ACM, NewYork, NY, USA, 8pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3396339.3396344