Electrostatic Tactile Feedback Designs for Touchscreen Controllers in Turbulence

Abstract

Over the past decade, the increasing integration of touchscreens in vehicles has raised questions about their usability, particularly in turbulent conditions. Tactile feedback has been shown to enhance the intuitiveness and interactivity of digital interfaces, indicating its potential benefits for improving touch-based controls in turbulent environments. This study aims to understand the efficacy of tactile feedback, electrovibration, under turbulence by evaluating its influence on the user’s performance, e.g. movement time and error rate. An experiment with 16 participants in the SIMONA Research Simulator at Delft University of Technology is performed in which three different designed stimuli are presented and evaluated based on a Fitts' law evaluation task: affirmative virtual fixtures, affirmative gradient and full-screen haptics. The key takeaways from the results can be articulated in two main points: firstly, the observable significant difference can be attributed to turbulence (increase in pure movement time of 74.29 ms, increase in error rate of 2.08%); secondly, a lack of significant difference among the haptic stimuli was noted concerning movement time, error rate, and path nonlinearity. This study finds that haptic feedback does not significantly impact user performance under turbulence and thus, this added friction does not hinder this interaction. While these haptic stimuli offer time-based continuous feedback when users are on the path, to enhance touchscreen interaction, future designs should better align with users' perceptual sensitivity to change rather than temporal steady-state cues.