Design and evaluation of haptic feedback for in-vehicle touch screens

Abstract

The main topic of this project is the introduction of haptic feedback for touch screens in an in-vehicle environment. Due to the numerous studies on confirmation haptic feedback, this project regards navigation haptic feedback. The importance of this project is to provide an overview of this kind of haptic feedback. Also, to prove the ability of touch screens to assist drivers in the interaction with a multifunctional device in a driving situation. For this purpose, an introduction of the background was carried out, including touch screens, technologies producing haptic feedback, the sense of touch and users in a driving situation. From this, two conclusions were taken. First, the kind of touch screen that most suits an in-vehicle environment is a multicapacitive touch screen. Also, that the best technology to produce navigation haptic feedback is the texture surface changing. Taking these results into consideration a prototype was implemented. This prototype was tested in a usability study. The main problem found out during the usability study is the long learnability time needed by the participants due to the new way of interaction introduced to be able to navigate. From the information of the usability study the following results have been extracted. The actions that were helped by the introduction of navigation haptic feedback were navigation across items and level selectors. It has been shown that a standardized selection of haptic feedback is needed in order to reduce learnability time and introduce guessability in future touch screen devices. Some more studies, when looking upon different traffic situations must be carried out in order to understand if also theese conditions require the same amount of help introduced by navigation haptic feedback. An important result of this project is that none of the participants in the usability study turned off the optional haptic feedback, when this was included in their multifunctional in-vehicle device. This shown a trust on haptics that has to be seen as a motive to continue working on it.