tactoRing: A Skin-Drag Discrete Display

Abstract

Smart rings are an emerging wearable technology particularly suitable for discrete notifications based on haptic cues. Previous work mostly focused on tactile actuators that stimulate only specific skin receptors on the finger, resulting in limited information expressiveness. We propose tactoRing, a novel tactile display that, by dragging a small tactor on the skin around the finger, excites multiple skin areas resulting in more accurate cue recognition. In this paper we present the hardware and a perception study to understand the ability of users to recognize eight distinct points around the finger. Moreover, we show two different techniques to encode information through skin-dragging motion with accuracy up to 94%. We finally showcase a set of applications that, by combining sequences of tactile stimuli, achieve higher expressiveness than prior methods.