Mobile

Discreet Signaling

Discreet Signaling with Touch

Touch provides discreet signaling in socially sensitive situations and cognitively light signaling when the user is occupied with a primary task.
With touch tracks, distinctive caller-id ringers can still work when audio is muted.
Mom’s SOS text can be distinguished from Twitter streams without constant beeps and screen glances.
Differentiated time- and proximity-based alerts with the least possible intrusiveness: friend finders, location-based couponing are possible.
Users can generate their own alert touch patterns through simple on-device authoring applications.

Audio Is Intrusive and Often Ineffective

For most mobile phone users today, their phone is spending more and more of its day with audio ringers muted. The sphere of socially sensitive areas where audible ringers are considered bad etiquette is expanding from restaurants and performance spaces to include cafes, offices, and public transportation. Meanwhile, subscribers are receiving increasing numbers of diverse notifications in the form of person-to-person text messages, premium service alerts, Tweets, emails, instant messages, and presence updates; all this on top of steady traffic in voice calls and voicemail notifications.

Ideally, users should know what to react to, and with what urgency, even when their phone is in manner mode -- perhaps even including times when they are engaged in other tasks that demand considerable focus.

Haptics Helps

Rich tactile signaling addresses these problems. The touch channel is uniquely capable of being both discreet in a socially sensitive situation like a business meeting, and cognitively unobtrusive when attention is occupied with a primary task, like delivering a presentation, or carrying on a conversation.

All that is needed:

A haptic platform for rendering subtle, full-fidelity vibrotactile sensations
Integration with the signaling mechanisms in embedded and third-party communication applications
A library of recognizable and memorable vibration patterns, either embedded, downloaded, or user-authored

Touch Instead of Sound

For example, the Samsung SGH-E770 feature phone allows assignment of any of 15 embedded vibration-enabled ringers to individual contacts or arbitrary groups of contacts. Then it lets users select whether calls should trigger sound only, sound plus vibration, or vibration only. With the Samsung E770, a user could assign a special ringer to the babysitter, and then later in the movie theater with the phone’s sound turned off, calls from the babysitter would still be recognizable through their distinctive vibration pattern. Why let users rely on distracting sound or obtrusive fumbling with buttons and screens when a gentle touch can tell them all they need to know about who is contacting them and how?

Mobile