Thermal Feedback for Simulated Lane Change Scenarios

Background

Haptic feedback has been the focus of research for some time. Mostly, vibration, or vibrotactile feedback, has been investigated for several applications (Brewster and Brown, 2004; Brown et al., 2006). Among those are the presentation of warnings (Brown and Kaaresoja, 2006) and instructions (Pielot et al., 2010).

In cars, haptic feedback is often used for navigation. Kern et al. (2009) attached vibrotactile actuators to the steering wheel and used vibration in combination with auditory and visual cues to convey navigation information for lane changes. In their experiments, they encountered problems when presenting vibration alone on one side of the steering wheel: participants had trouble identifying the vibrating side. Additionally, the information presented was not easily distinguished when presented by itself and influenced the driving performance negatively. When vibration was presented in a multimodal setting, with visual and auditory cues, driving performance was increased and participants preferred the visual and tactile combination.