Hans-Jörg Schulz

In visualization, user guidance has become an essential concept to aid users in making informed decisions ranging from what subsets to focus on in the data space to which regions to explore in the view space. To guide users, predominantly visual cues like colors or arrows are used to indicate particular targets or directions. In this paper, we explore the possibility of another sensory channel for guidance cues: vibrotactile feedback. To that end, we explore different properties of the vibrotactile channel (e.g., amplitude and duration) and discuss their potential use as guidance cues. We then report on an experiment (N=14) in which we investigate possible vibrotactile cues in comparison to visual cues and to a combination of visual and vibrotactile cues for a guided selection scenario and a guided navigation scenario. Although none of the vibrotactile cues significantly outperformed the visual cues, our study results shed light on a number of practical issues when using vibration for user guidance - including differences between various types of vibrotactile feedback, as well as diverging performance for different guidance scenarios.