Haptic Confusion Mitigation

Pattern, Effects and Samples

A Pattern is a model that describes the sequencing of samples, while haptic effects are instances of this sequencing that are being rendered are run-time.

For each pattern, there can only be 5 simultaneously playing samples. While there are a limited number of samples that can play simultaneously, i.e., only 10 independent haptic samples can be rendered simultaneously on the vest without regard to their spatialization.

The two next section will present features which alleviates this limitation.

Effect Priority Levels

Since only 10 independent haptic samples can be rendered simultaneously on the vest, extra samples are then “muted”, i.e., they are alive but not rendered. However, it is a pattern instance (Haptic Effect) as a whole which is muted, i.e., all haptics samples composing it together are muted.

Haptic Effect instances are then ordered by priority and only the effects with higher priority will be rendered, while the others will be muted.

The priority logic follows 3 rules to order two haptic effect:

• The priority effect is the one with the lowest priority level.
• The priority effect is the one using the smallest number of simultaneous samples (see Unitouch Studio).
• The priority effect is the most recent one, i.e., playing for the shortest amount of time.

Keep in mind

Having too many effect playing simultaneously might:

• Make the actuators saturate and distort the rendered signals.
• Confuse the user as too many sensations happen simultaneously.

Effect Accumulation

The effect accumulation strategy allows to trigger a secondary pattern as a fallback when an effect using the main pattern is already being rendered. The purpose of this feature is to enable the use of a lighter pattern if a specific pattern might be called too many times. It enables the main effect to be rendered fully while having another effect triggered and still providing the additional event. This alleviates several matters:

• When there are too many complex effects rendered at once, it might become even more confusing for the user as the vest is vibrating too much.
• When there are too many effects using too many samples simultaneously, the older effects might be muted by default, preventing any effect from being fully rendered.

Keep in mind

Notice that, when too many effects are still triggered simultaneously, this feature allows to reduce the amount of vibration and avoid immersion breaking behavior, but the user might still be confused.

The accumulation is done on the specified time window, starting with the first call. Each subsequent call within this time window will trigger the fallback pattern.

It is possible to set a maximum amount of rendered effects within the time window to avoid an excessive amount of triggered effects, additional calls will then be ignored until the time window is finished. If the subsequent call has the same or higher priority, the actual priority is set to be just below the main effect, as to preserve the unity of the accumulation with respect to other playing effects.

However, if the subsequent calls have lower priorities, then the standard priority system is used.