What You Feel Must Be What You See: Adding Tactile Feedback to the Trackpoint

The present study makes two contributions to the literature on tactile feedback. First, it investigates the effect of tactile feedback in isometric rate control devices. The use of tactile feedback in this type of device has not been systematically investigated. An isometric joystick, such as the IBM TrackpointTM in-keyboard pointing device does not perceptibly move and is operated by force. Can tactile information delivered to the user’s fingertip through such a device provide a feeling of texture? Second, it investigates the interplay of tactile and visual information. We hypothesized that tactile displays are often ineffective because they are not synchronized with visual information. We developed a simple isometric tactile device, Tractile, based on the TrackpointTM pointing device, which can vibrate its tip under program control. We conducted an experimental study using this device. Under various visual and tactile feedback conditions, experimental participants performed a tunnel steering task that resembles menu navigation and other real tasks. We found that tactile feedback did in fact give users a feeling of texture, and can speed up steering performance when the texture presented visually matches the texture presented tactilely.