Directional cueing of gaze with a vibrotactile headband

Augmented attention is one of the ways human action can be enhanced with technologies. Still, more research is needed to find out effective ways to direct human attention to objects that have been determined as important to pay attention to. We investigated how vibrotactile stimulation given to the forehead could be used to cue gaze direction. We built a headband with an array of six vibrotactile actuators that presented short, tap like cues on the forehead. In an experiment, a horizontal line was shown on a computer display, and the participant's task was to look at the point of the line that they thought the vibrotactile cue was pointing to. Information of participant's gaze points was recorded using an eye tracker attached to the display. Analysis of the gaze points showed that for the majority of participants there were statistically significant differences between cues from different actuators. This indicated that the six actuators could successfully direct the participant's gaze to different areas of the visual field. On average, the precision of gaze points related to each actuator was comparable to the width of two to three fingers at arm's length. The findings of this study showed that there is potential in using vibrotactile cueing of gaze direction, for example, for directing visual attention and providing navigation cues with wearable devices such as headbands, head-mounted displays, and virtual reality headsets.