Direct Manipulation in Tactile Displays

Tactile displays have predominantly been used for information transfer using patterns or as assistive feedback for interactions. With recent advances in hardware for conveying increasingly rich tactile information that mirrors visual information, and the increasing viability of wearables that remain in constant contact with the skin, there is a compelling argument for exploring tactile interactions as rich as visual displays. Direct Manipulation underlies much of the advances in visual interactions. In this work, we introduce the concept of a Direct Manipulation-enabled Tactile display (DMT). We define the concepts of a tactile screen, tactile pixel, tactile pointer, and tactile target which enable tactile pointing, selection and drag & drop. We build a proof of concept tactile display and study its precision limits. We further develop a performance model for DMTs based on a tactile target acquisition study. Finally, we study user performance in a real-world DMT menu application. The results show that users are able to use the application with relative ease and speed.