Smart-rings are ideal for subtle and always-available haptic notifications due to their direct contact with the skin. Previous researchers have highlighted the feasibility of haptic technology in smart-rings and their promise in delivering noticeable stimulations by poking a limited set of planar locations on the finger. However, the full potential of poking as a mechanism to deliver richer and more expressive information on the finger is overlooked. With three studies and a total of 76 participants, we informed the design of PokeRing, a smart-ring capable of delivering information via stimulating eight different locations around the index finger’s proximal phalanx. We report our evaluation of the performance of PokeRing in semi-realistic wearable conditions, (standing and walking), and its effective usage for information transfer with twenty-one spatio-temporal patterns designed by six interaction designers in a workshop. Finally, we present three applications that exploit PokeRing’s notification usages.
Seungwoo Je, Minkyeong Lee, Yoonji Kim, Liwei Chan, Xing-Dong Yang, and Andrea Bianchi. 2018. PokeRing: Notifications by Poking Around the Finger. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 542, 10 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174116