VIREO: Web-based Graphical Authoring of Vibrotactile Feedback for Interactions with Mobile and Wearable Devices

Abstract

We introduce VIREO, a web-based software tool for graphical authoring of vibrotactile feedback for mobile and wearable applications. VIREO enables flexible specification of vibrotactile patterns with model-based and free-draw input, and is compatible with devices that run JavaScript, either natively or in a web browser. We demonstrate VIREO with applications developed for smartphones, smartwatches, armbands, and smartglasses, and we present the results of a usability evaluation study with sixteen participants represented by coders with various programming experience. We discuss our contributions in the context of the results of a Systematic Literature Review conducted on the topic of software tools, editors, and platforms developed in the scientific community for authoring vibrotactile feedback. Given that one finding of our review is the little availability of such contributions, we release VIREO as a free resource on the web for researchers and practitioners to author and integrate vibrotactile feedback in mobile and wearable applications.

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Core Haptics—Apple Developer Documentation, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corehaptics.

2 Haptrix— Create & Share Haptic Experiences, https://www.haptrix.com.

3 Lofelt—Unlock the power of haptics in mobile devices, https://lofelt.com.

4 Syntacts—The Tactor Synthesizer, https://www.syntacts.org.

5 Although adaptation to mobile platforms might be possible; see FAQ, Can Syntacts be used for mobile haptic applications?, https://www.syntacts.org/faq. However, Syntacts was primarily intended for desktop-based research and applications (see link above).

6 For example, wearables running Tizen can be programmed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Tizen Studio enables development of web applications for mobile, wearable, and TV devices, which consist of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS combined in a package deployed to a Tizen device, such as Samsung Galaxy smartwatches; see https://docs.tizen.org/application/web/index.

7 Vibration API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_API) enables web applications to access the vibration hardware from mobile and wearable devices as long as the patterns can be described as series of on and off pulses. This functionality is limited, but via pulse-width modulation (PWM), it enables many haptic effects for web applications running JavaScript, eg, see http://www.hapticsjs.org or https://npm.io/package/vtp.js.

8 An adapted form of the query was used in IEEE Xplore due to the specifics of the IEEE Xplore search engine, but with the same keywords and operators: “Abstract”: vibrotactile AND (“Abstract”: feedback OR “Abstract”: pattern*) AND (“Abstract”: tool* OR “Abstract”: platform* OR “Abstract”: author*).

9 We also removed (Lee & Choi, 2012) that described VibScoreEditor, a tool relevant to our scope, but already presented in a previous article (Lee et al., 2009a) by the same authors.

10 Tizen Studio enables development of web applications for mobile, wearable, and TV devices, which consist of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS combined in a package deployed to a Tizen device; see https://docs.tizen.org/application/web/index.

11 Statista. Most used programming languages among developers worldwide, as of early 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages.

12 Node.js, https://nodejs.org.

13 NestJS—A progressive Node.js framework, https://nestjs.com.

14 Vue.js, the progressive JavaScript framework, https://vuejs.org.

15 Chart.js—Open source HTML5 Charts for your web site, https://www.chartjs.org.

16 Vibration API—Web APIs, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_API.

17 See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_API.

18 Snake (video game genre)—Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre).

19 See https://developerblog.myo.com.

20 See https://www.vuzix.com/products/blade-smart-glasses-upgraded.

21 We used the CSUQ version instead of PSSUQ by following the recommendation from (Lewis, 1995, p. 77) to apply CSUQ when the usability study is in a nonlaboratory setting, which was the case for our study.

22 According to the standard letter grade scale for interpreting SUS scores (Bangor et al., 2009), products that score in the 90s are “exceptional,” products that score in the 80s are “good,” and products that score in the 70s are “acceptable”; also see Lewis (2018b).

23 According to Bangor et al. (2009), the correspondence between adjective ratings and mean SUS scores are: “worst imaginable” (M = 12.5, SD = 13.1), “awful” (M = 20.3, SD = 11.3), “poor” (M = 35.7, SD = 12.6), “OK” (M = 50.9, SD = 13.8), “good” (M = 71.4, SD = 11.6), “excellent” (M = 85.5, SD = 10.4), and “best imaginable” (M = 90.9, SD = 13.4); also see Lewis (2018b).

24 Details available at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_API. Also see https://caniuse.com/vibration for more details and tests.

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 860114.

Notes on contributors

Mihail Terenti

Mihail Terenti is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Stage Researcher at the Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania, where he works on multimodal feedback to augment the user experience of touch input.

Radu-Daniel Vatavu

Radu-Daniel Vatavu is a Professor of Computer Science at the Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava, where he directs the Machine Intelligence and Information Visualization Research Laboratory. His research interests include human–computer interaction, augmented reality, ambient intelligence, and accessible computing.