Smart rings are an emerging wearable technology designed for discreet notifications using haptic cues. Traditional tactile actuators stimulate limited skin receptors on the finger, restricting information expressiveness. We introduce tactoRing, a novel tactile display that drags a small tactor around the finger to stimulate multiple skin areas, enhancing cue recognition accuracy. This paper presents the hardware and a perception study demonstrating users’ ability to recognize eight distinct points around the finger. Additionally, two techniques for encoding information through skin-dragging motions achieve up to 94% accuracy. Finally, we showcase applications that combine sequences of tactile stimuli to provide greater expressiveness than previous methods.
Seungwoo Je, Brendan Rooney, Liwei Chan, and Andrea Bianchi. 2017. tactoRing: A Skin-Drag Discrete Display. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3106-3114. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025703
Pin-Cheng Lin, HyunJoo Oh, Mark D. Gross, Michael Eisenberg, Sherry His, Becca Rose Glowacki, Mark Wonnacott, Amy Rose, Emma Powell, Liv Bargman, Seungwoo Je, Brendan Rooney, Liwei Chan, and Andrea Bianchi. 2018. Demo hour. Interactions 25, 2 (February 2018), 6-9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3183514