Combining vibrotactile and kinaesthetic cues in haptic volume visualization

Haptics has in earlier work shown the potential to assist in the understanding of an otherwise overwhelming amount of information in scientific and medical visualization. In the typical scientific data, with many different properties such as pressure, temperature, strain, etc, the user is required to switch between what data to represent through the haptic feedback. In this paper we explore the possibility to simultaneously represent, in a comprehensive way, more than one property through the haptic feedback by dividing the feedback into the two components of the haptic sense. Two vibrotactile metaphors for scalar data are described, roughness and transition cue, that can be used in combination with a kinaesthetic representation of either scalar or vector data. The paper also presents an evaluation that shows that the individual cues from the two haptic metaphors can be discriminated, and that the combined feedback can be used to find combinations of features in data.