Demos

There are two demos available to allow you to try out the Tactons described in our papers and a pin array demo of a graph browsing programme .

Tactons Demo 1
The first Tactons Demo presents our initial ideas on the design of vibro-tactile Tactons. This demo was presented at CHI, and accompanies the paper:

Brewster, S.A. and Brown, L.M. Non-Visual Information Display Using Tactons. In Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2004 (Vienna, Austria), ACM Press, pp787-788.

Mobile Phone Alert Tactons Demo
The second demo shows some more sophisticated Tactons developed after evaluation. This demo presents Tactons which represent mobile phone alerts, and accompanies the paper:

Brown, L.M., Brewster, S.A., and Purchase, H.C. A First Investigation into the Effectiveness of Tactons. In Proceedings of WorldHaptics 2005 (Pisa, Italy). IEEE Press.

This demonstration was also presented at World Haptics 2005.

Graph Browser Demo

This executable is a graph browsing programme for visually impaired computer users. The software allows browsing of bar graphs, pie charts and line graphs (not fully evaluated) using tactile pin-array, speech and non-speech audio feedback.

Haptic Keyboard

This demo augments the standard iPhone keyboard with haptic feedback from the built-in motor. By using haptic feedback, users can physically ‘feel’ their interface and any feedback provided thus reducing the visual demand and allowing for more socially appropriate and subtle interaction.

More information can be found at http://code.google.com/p/iphone-haptics/

A more sophisticated augmented keyboard is discussed along with results of a text entry experiment in the paper:

Hoggan, E, Brewster, S.A. and Johnston, J. Investigating the Effectiveness of Tactile Feedback for Mobile Touchscreens. In Proceedings of ACM CHI2008 (Florence, Italy). ACM Press Addison Wesley, pp 1573-1582.

File - o - Feel

This demo introduces a new type of widget, the T-Bar (tactile bar), designed specifically for finger-based touchscreen interfaces using tactile feedback. Through the addition of tactile feedback, the user’s fingertip is guided along the T-Bar until an item is successfully selected. File-o-Feel and T-Bars are discussed in the paper:

Hall, M., Hoggan, E. and Brewster, S.A. T-Bars: Towards Tactile User Interfaces for Mobile Touchscreens. In Proceedings of MobileHCI 2008 (Amsterdam, Holland), ACM Press, pp 411-414.