Adding Vibrotactile Feedback to Large Interactive Surfaces

Interactive surfaces and multi-touch tables are increasingly available outside academic contexts, and are entering, for instance, work or educational contexts. A large variety of applications exists for a multitude of tasks. For interacting with these applications, existing interaction concepts are often directly mapped to the multi-touch surface, which is often limited by physical constraints. For instance, to enter text on an interactive surface, most often a virtual keyboard is used. However, users cannot feel when, for instance, they have accidentally pressed two keys at the same time. Research on mobile devices has identified vibrotactile feedback as an effective means to support users when interacting with touch screens. In this work, we present results of an experiment in which we investigated whether typical tasks (e.g., typing text, drag-and-drop of items) on interactive multi-touch surfaces can be supported by providing vibrotactile feedback directly on the surface. We compared direct feedback with distal feedback provided on the user's body, as well as their combination. Surprisingly, our results show that all compared variants of vibrotactile feedback had no significant positive effect on the task performance. Yet participants rated tactile feedback significantly higher regarding interaction support and subjective speed compared to no provided feedback.