Haptic Collar: Vibrotactile Feedback around the Neck for Guidance Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we present a Haptic Collar prototype, a neck worn band with vibrotactile actuators for eyes-free haptic navigation. We evaluate the system for guidance applications on over 11 users, analyzing 4 different tactile patterns regarding comfort and ease of understanding as well as the number of actuators to encode 8 directions (4, 6 and 8). Overall, users can recognize the directional signs well (up to 95 % recognition rates for over 528 triggers). We also present a use case applying our prototype for a haptic navigation walk.