GuidingBand: A Precise Tactile Hand Guidance System to Aid Visual Perception

Computerised guidance systems can help alleviate tedious everyday tasks such as identifying a desired object in a collection of similar objects. Such guidance systems can prove useful as microinteractions if they are made accessible as a consumer wearable that delivers tactile feedback. We designed a wrist-wearable tactile guidance system called GuidingBand that provides vibrational cues to help the user pick visual targets out of an array. We conducted two studies to evaluate it. The studies involve presenting visual targets to users on a screen and giving them visual search tasks. In study 1, we identified the error rate of our guidance system. We presented users (N = 20) with arrays of identical, square targets to pick from, progressively reduced the target sizes and evaluated error rates for each size. Notably, we observed a 4% error rate at a target size of 10 mm. In study 2, we compared the error rate of the guidance system with and without the help of human visual perception in a visual search task. We constructed a task that involved showing users an array of rectangles varying only in length and asked them to identify the correct target which was previously shown to them. Users (N = 13) had fewer errors when they tried to identify targets with tactile guidance alone, followed by guidance and perception combined and perception alone. It was surprising that instead of improving the precision of the users’ performance, their visual perception in fact deteriorated it.