Design of haptic stimuli for audio-haptic concurrent coupling

Existing audio-haptic coupling strategies mainly enable the display of information with complementary features. For example, the rendering of spatial and local features of targets in 3D space. This paper presents the design of haptic stimuli for a new audio-haptic coupling strategy that utilizes the concurrent use of the two modal channels. This coupling strategy should assist in the intermodal comparison of values simultaneously presented on the audio and haptic channels. The proposed haptic signal includes a tempo parameter which can be shared, under some conditions, with the audio channel. This paper presents a detailed experimental study to design haptic stimuli according to the audio-haptic coupling strategy specifications. This study is presented in the context of an ongoing project concerning the exploitation of this parametric haptic signal for the comparison of values during a search task.