Vibrotactile jacket for perception enhancement

By nature, human beings perceive their environment mostly using sight and audition. Vibrotactile feedback has proven satisfying results in the domains of simple multimodal interaction, for immersion and navigation purposes. The scope of this research is to evaluate the additional value of tactile feedback on the user upper body limbs to pass 3D directional information. This paper presents the development of a vibrotactile jacket and its software interface. A validation concept test bench has been setup to measure the effect of our vibrotactile device onto the response time to localize a target in a virtual environment over visual and auditory cue. Early results are encouraging by showing clear benefits of our vibrotactile system while the complexity of the multimodal environment is increasing.