Information Transfer of Full-Body Vibrotactile Stimuli: An Initial Study with One to Three Sequential Vibrations

Full-body vibrotactile stimuli are a promising means by which haptic interaction designers can substantially increase information transfer (IT). This paper reports the IT values of full-body sequential vibrotactile stimuli applied to ten body sites. We designed 10, 100, and 1,000 stimuli by increasing the number of vibrations in a sequence from one to three and estimated IT for each condition. We also obtained the lower and upper bounds of the IT estimates using several empirical methods to compensate for their biases. The IT estimate for each condition was 3.32, 6.55, and 8.05 bits, the highest IT ever reported in the haptics literature. This study is the first attempt to quantity the IT of full-body vibrotactile sequences, providing guidelines for the design of effective full-body vibrotactile stimuli.