TouchBall: a design and evaluation of a hand-held trackball based touch-haptic interface

In this paper, we present a design and an evaluation of a hand-held trackball based touch-haptic interface, named "TouchBall." Using a trackball mechanism, the device provides flexibility in terms of directional degrees of freedom. It also has an advantage of a direct transfer of force feedback through frictional touch (with high sensitivity), thus requiring only relatively small amount of inertia. This leads to a compact hand-held design appropriate for mobile and 3D interactive applications. The device is evaluated for the detection thresholds for directions of the force feedback and the perceived amount of directional force. The refined directionality information should combine with other modalities with less sensory conflict, enriching the user experience for a given application.

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