Where was it again?
Finding an object is a common yet time-consuming and frustrating chore. What makes this task complex is that humans’ pattern recognition capability reduces to a serial one-by-one search when the items resemble each other. A novel glove offers a solution.
The solution builds on inexpensive off-the-shelf components such as four vibrotactile actuators on a simple glove and a Microsoft Kinect sensor for tracking the user’s hand.
Researchers at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and Max Planck Institute for Informatics have developed a prototype of a glove that uses vibration feedback on the hand based on computer vision hand tracking to guide the user’s hand towards a predetermined target in 3D space.
The glove could help users in daily visual search tasks in supermarkets, parking lots, warehouses, libraries etc.
The main researcher, Ville Lehtinen of HIIT, explains: “The advantage of steering a hand with tactile cues is that the user can easily interpret them in relation to the current field of view where the visual search is operating. This provides a very intuitive experience, like the hand being ‘pulled’ toward the target.”
Unfortunately, the innovation cannot be used to find lost keys, wallets etc because the location of the object has to be predetermined, as it usually is in warehouses and libraries etc.
“In search tasks where there were hundreds of candidates but only one correct target, users wearing the glove were consistently faster, with up to three times faster performance than without the glove,” says Dr. Antti Oulasvirta from Max Planck Institute for Informatics.
Dr. Petteri Nurmi from HIIT adds: “This level of improvement in search performance justifies several practical applications. For instance, warehouse workers could have gloves that guide them to target shelfs, or a pedestrian could navigate using this glove. With the relatively inexpensive components and the dynamic guidance algorithm, others can easily build their own personal guidance systems.”
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT is a joint research institute of Aalto University and the University of Helsinki for basic and applied research on information technology.
