Establishing Natural Tactile Mappings: Mapping Tactile Parameters to Continuous Data Concepts

There has been limited work developing natural mappings between tactile signals and common data concepts in data rich domains. If these mappings can be established, tactile displays can become more intuitive and readily adopted. The present study aims to identify general natural mappings between perceptual dimensions of vibration and continuous data concepts. Twenty-one participants were tasked to map four different tactile parameters to four different data concepts—pressure, concentration, size, and speed. We found that an increase in intensity was good at conveying increases for all data concepts. We also found that speed, pressure, concentration, and size all have at least one strong natural mapping.