A Haptic Back Display

Whereas most interfaces have been developed for the hands, we focus on a part of our body that's been neglected by most researchers so far – the back. Our research has demonstrated that vibrotactile cues delivered to a user's back can effectively redirect the user's visual attention. In one study, we found that haptic cueing can reduce the time it takes a person to detect a visual change on a computer monitor by as much as 40%. Such a haptic attentional cueing system can be beneficial to a user who must attend to information displayed within a large and complex visual display, such as the cockpit of an aircraft or the large wall display in the NASA mission control room. In another study, we found that naïve observers were able to discern the directions of a set of horizontal, vertical and diagonal directional lines with high accuracy. These directional lines can be applied to a haptic navigation guidance system or a haptic situation awareness system. Our work contributes to the development of novel haptic interfaces.


Project Publications

J. Jay Young, Hong Z. Tan and Rob Gray, "Validity of haptic cues and its effect on priming visual spatial attention," Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, IEEE Computer Society, Los Angeles, CA, Mar. 22-23, pp. 166-170, 2003. PDF (542KB)

Rob Gray and Hong Tan, "Combination of visual and tactile information about moving objects," Fall Vision Meeting, Tucson, AZ, 2003. (Abstract only.)

Hong Z. Tan, Rob Gray, J. Jay Young, and Ryan Traylor, "A haptic back display for attentional and directional cueing," Haptics-e: The Electronic Journal of Haptics Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, 20 pp., June 11,2003. PDF (703KB)

Ryan Traylor and Hong Z. Tan, "Development of a wearable haptic display for situation awareness in altered-gravity environment: Some initial findings," In Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, IEEE Computer Society, Orlando, FL, pp. 159-164, 2002. PDF (1.7MB)

Rob Gray and Hong Z. Tan, "Dynamic and predictive links between touch and vision," Experimental Brain Research, Vol. 145, pp. 50-55, 2002. PDF (87KB)

Ryan Traylor and Hong Z. Tan, "Development of a wearable haptic display for situation awareness in altered-gravity environment: Some initial findings," In Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, IEEE Computer Society, Orlando, FL, pp. 159-164, 2002. PDF (1.7MB)

Rob Gray, Hong Z. Tan and J. Jay Young, "Do multimodal signals need to come from the same place? Crossmodal attentional links between proximal and distal surfaces," Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, Pittsburgh, PA, Oct. 14-16, pp. 437-441, 2002. PDF (282KB)

Hong Z. Tan, Robert Gray, J. Jay Young, and Piti Irawan, "Haptic cueing of a visual change-detection task: Implications for multimodal interfaces," In Usability Evaluation and Interface Design: Cognitive Engineering, Intelligent Agents and Virtual Reality (Vol. 1 of the Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction), M. J. Smith, G. Salvendy, D. Harris, and R. J. Koubek (Eds.), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Orleans, LA, pp.678-682, 2001. PDF (265KB)

Robert Gray and Hong Z. Tan, "Dynamic spatial mapping between vision and touch," Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society, Vol. 5, pp. 38, 2000. PDF (184KB)

Hong Tan, Adrian Lim, and Ryan Traylor, "A psychophysical study of sensory saltation with an open response paradigm," In Proceedings of the Ninth (9th) International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, American Society of Mechanical Engineers Dynamic Systems and Control Division, Vol. 69-2, S. S. Nair(Ed.), Orlando, FL, pp. 1109-1115, 2000. PDF (1.0MB)

Sevgi Ertan, Clare Lee, Abigail Willets, Hong Tan and Alex Pentland, "A wearable haptic navigation guidance system." In Digest of the Second International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Oct. 19-20, Pittsburgh,PA, pp. 164-165, 1998. PDF (368KB)