Gaze Cueing with a Vibrotactile Headband for a Visual Search Task

Augmented attention, assisting the user in noticing important things, is one of the ways human action can be enhanced with technologies. We investigated how vibrotactile stimulation given to the forehead could be used to cue gaze direction. We built a vibrotactile headband with an array of six actuators that presented short, tap-like cues. In the first experiment, the participant was instructed to look at the point on a horizontal line that they thought the vibrotactile cue was pointing to. Analysis of the participant’s gaze points showed that for the majority 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. In addition, vibrotactile cueing of gaze direction could be used for directing visual attention and providing navigation cues with wearable headbands. To strengthen our findings, we investigated how effective the vibrotactile stimulation would be to cue gaze direction in a visual search task. Participant’s were asked to find a deviant shape (a target) from a display full of simple shapes. The vibrotactile cueing implemented with the headband device was used to inform the participants of the approximate horizontal position of the target in three different experimental conditions. In the most informative condition, six actuators were used to inform the participant of the horizontal area where the target would be found, in the second condition two actuators were used to inform the participant of the target side on the display (left or right), and in the least informative condition no directional information was given. Analysis of the trial completion times showed that there were statistically significant differences between the least informative condition and the two other conditions. However, we did not find significant differences in trial completion times between the two conditions where information of the target location was given. This indicated that while the actuators could successfully direct the participant’s attention to different areas of the visual field to help in the search task, the simple approach of just adding actuators and dividing the visual field to more sub-areas did not improve the results. The findings of this study showed that while there is potential in using vibrotactile cueing of gaze direction, more research is needed to fully exploit it.