Vibrotactile score: A score metaphor for designing vibrotactile patterns

Despite the plethora of vibrotactile applications that already have begun to impact our everyday life, how to design vibrotactile patterns easily and efficiently remains to be a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a vibrotactile score, an effective means for composing vibrotactile patterns. The vibrotactile score is a metaphor of the musical score to vibrotaction, and its design is adapted from two common musical scores (the piano score and the guitar tablature). Moreover, we developed an authoring tool, vibrotactile score editor (VibScoreEditor), that fully supports the vibrotactile score with intuitive graphical user interface. Another metaphorical feature, vibrotactile clef (analogous to the musical clef), is incorporated in the editor to make the process of composing vibrotactile patterns decoupled from the process of considering the signal-level characteristics of vibration. A few examples of vibrotactile patterns designed using the VibScoreEditor are also presented.