Data-Driven Vibrotactile Rendering of Digital Buttons on Touchscreens

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to generate realistic vibrotactile feedback on touchscreens using piezo actuators, enabling users to distinguish digital buttons from physical ones with high accuracy and similar tactile perceptions.

Contribution

It introduces a data-driven approach to create tactile feedback that mimics physical buttons on touchscreens, enhancing user experience and interaction realism.

Findings

Participants matched digital and physical buttons with 83% success.

Digital buttons elicited similar perceptual adjectives as physical buttons.

Three adjective pairs showed significant similarity between digital and physical buttons.

Abstract

Although mobile phones incorporate low-cost vibration motors to enhance touch-based interactions, it is not possible to generate complex tactile effects on their touchscreens. It is also difficult to relate the limited vibrotactile feedback generated by these motors to different types of physical buttons. In this study, we focus on creating vibrotactile feedback on a touchscreen that simulates the feeling of physical buttons using piezo actuators attached to it. We first recorded and analyzed the force, acceleration, and voltage data from twelve participants interacting with three different physical buttons: latch, toggle, and push buttons. Then, a button-specific vibrotactile stimulus was generated for each button based on the recorded data. Finally, we conducted a threealternative forced choice (3AFC) experiment with twenty participants to explore whether the resultant stimulus is distinct and realistic. In our experiment, participants were able to match the three digital buttons with their physical counterparts with a success rate of 83%. In addition, we harvested seven adjective pairs from the participants expressing their perceptual feeling of pressing the physical buttons. All twenty participants rated the degree of their subjective feelings associated with each adjective for all the physical and digital buttons investigated in this study. Our statistical analysis showed that there exist at least three adjective pairs for which participants have rated two out of three digital buttons similar to their physical counterparts.