Final Reflection Document

What are the specific questions you are attempting to answer in your prototypes?

Initially, started with a question of how to make public spaces more independently accessible for the vision impaired people? which narrowed down to How can different feedback type and form factor play a role in communicating information to the user? This further narrowed down to How can feedback and form factor play a role in communicating navigational information to the user? Further, in prototyping I wanted to explore the spatial resolution of human hands and if the idea of haptic wearable display is possible or not? Also, I wanted to experiment, to what extent can human brain make sense of patterns being drawn on skin using haptic feedback matrix.

What the five strengths of your project?

1. It allows users to experience directional data perception in a complete new form.
2. It enable users to have sensory substitution or in other words, user’s are no more required to focus their primary attention, i.e., vision and auditory sense, to look for google maps on screen or listening to google for directions.
3. In a time span of about 30 minutes of first time use, the brain learns the patterns or directions and no longer requires user to focus and think on what pattern is being drawn on user’s hand. The brains starts to recognize the patterns at its own (in a subconscious manner)
4. The vibration motors allow for a varying intensity which allows to have a lot more than just turning the motor on and off. This also allows to have wider set of vibration patterns.
5. The ability of the glove to connect to multiple interfaces like USB, Bluetooth or WiFi, gives it more flexibility and opens up more possibilities for its usage.

What are the five most critical issues for your project?

1. The vibration’s intensity can be soft or hard depending on different users.
2. If the user’s skin does not have a good contact with the skin the vibrations might not be felt at the specific spots as it should have been.
3. Can haptic feedback have any medical implications in long term use?
4. The vibration motors are Y-axis motors and can reduce the tap effect which was initially intended.
5. To what extent does the flexibility and movement of the user’s hand is hindered while wearing the glove?

What can you do to address these issues, and to solidify the strengths?

To address the issue where user needs to have a good contact with the vibration motors, I would need to experiment with different stretchable materials which could allow even further customizations for the user and also, having electronics being embedded onto it. The varying vibration feedback intensity could be fixed by giving a provision to the user to adjust the intensity as per user’s need. This could be in form of a physical control on the glove or on the app. Further experimentation and consulting medical professionals for any negative implications of long term haptic feedback on the body could be possibly useful to comment upon if it has any negative side effects of prolonged usage.

What new questions do you have?

As Ayo suggested, can this be extended further and have further translations than just navigation? Moreover, how can this be iterated further to be more impactful and have a more seamless integration?This could be a step in no-screen displays. Also, this leads to a question of how complex data can be communicated to the user using non-screen displays?

What questions need to be answered in order to create a proof of concept prototype?

A few questions that need to be answered in order to create a PoC prototype for the haptic display glove are -

• Does it have any medical implications on prolonged usage?
• What battery life could be expected from the glove? Considering it remains light-weight and wearable.
• Can Y-axis haptic motors be replaced by z-axis haptic motors for improved feedback while maintaining the same compact form factor?
• Is response time for perceiving the feedback same or almost same for all the users?

How has this prototype allowed you to engage in your goals within this program? Does this feel like a possible future direction?

Exploring how haptic feedback displays could create an external sense to the human body which can be used for a wide range of use cases such as navigation, virtual reality, data perception, audio perception and possibly a haptic display for the vision impaired people.

This project allowed me to explore different field like sensory substitution and the concept of no-screen displays. The concept of no screen displays seems to be a direction I could possibly head towards and work in future.