Haptic u-Table: A Believable Feedback System with a Quasi-tangible Tabletop Interface

A haptic tabletop interface is developed to provide its users with a shared digital space and its believable feedbacks in multimodal interactions. The shared digital space means a table where the users can join and enjoy digital content such as games, pictures, etc. The believable feedback can be defined as a consistent notification mechanism to recognize actions of users and notify them of the corresponding results with various feedbacks. It can help users recognize errors and mistakes. It also improves performance of error recovery. Since the users of the tabletop interfaces are not necessarily computer experts, their performances and error recovery functions are important. The proposed haptic tabletop interface was evaluated in terms of its performances, errors and error recovery times. The results showed that the proposed tabletop interface demonstrated better performance in dragging operations.