Exploratory user study of haptic and auditory display for multimodal geographical information systems

In this paper, the result of haptic and auditory display experiments is reported as an exploratory user test for augmenting visually dominant geographical information systems (GIS). The test results showed the haptic display to be the best in performance, the auditory display to be the worst, and the combination of the two modes to lie in the middle. It was found that the musical experience and haptic device experience affected the performance of the auditory tasks and the haptic tasks respectively. The results also show that there is interference between two modes in the combined situation. The plans for future work are described, including the tests with different kinds of geographical information tasks.