Designing a Vibrotactile Head-Mounted Display for Spatial Awareness in 3D Spaces

Due to the perceptual characteristics of the head, vibrotactile Head-mounted Displays are built with low actuator density. Therefore, vibrotactile guidance is mostly assessed by pointing towards objects in the azimuthal plane. When it comes to multisensory interaction in 3D environments, it is also important to convey information about objects in the elevation plane. In this paper, we design and assess a haptic guidance technique for 3D environments. First, we explore the modulation of vibration frequency to indicate the position of objects in the elevation plane. Then, we assessed a vibrotactile HMD made to render the position of objects in a 3D space around the subject by varying both stimulus loci and vibration frequency. Results have shown that frequencies modulated with a quadratic growth function allowed a more accurate, precise, and faster target localization in an active head pointing task. The technique presented high usability and a strong learning effect for a haptic search across different scenarios in an immersive VR setup.