Comparing Direct and Remote Tactile Feedback on Interactive Surfaces

Tactile feedback on touch surfaces has shown to greatly improve the interaction in quantitative and qualitative metrics. Recently, researchers have assessed the notion of remote tactile feedback, i.e., the spatial separation of touch input and resulting tactile output on the user’s body. This approach has the potential to simplify the use of tactile feedback with arbitrary touch devices and allows the design of novel tactile stimuli by stimulus combination. However, a formal comparison of direct and remote tactile feedback during touch input is still missing. Therefore, we conducted three consecutive laboratory studies. First, we compared the effects of both direct and remote tactile stimuli on the user’s performance during touchscreen interactions. No difference was found in the positive effects of both types of feedback. Second, we evaluated the impact of the remote tactile actuator’s position on the user’s body. For remote tactile stimuli, we found improved accuracy and interaction speed, regardless of the body location. Third we analyzed remote tactile feedback under additional cognitive load. The results support the positive effects of tactile feedback on user performance and subjective evaluation. These findings encourage us to further exploit the potential of remote tactile feedback to simplify and expand the multimodal interaction with arbitrary touch interfaces.