Design of Stimulation by Floor Vibration to Prompt Distracted People’s Actions

Abstract

We conceived an idea to employ a floor vibration for prompting jostling oblivious people in public spaces, and conventional media, such as digital signages or voice announcements, do not seem to make an adequate warning. At the same time, many digital applications are concentrated on mobile phones, and the use of these applications in the device leads to addiction issues. Our main objective is to propose an alternative way of conveying information, with which people will react instinctively in a desired way in one’s context. The idea is to design a stimulus that people will react to instantly without contemplating its message much. Thus, we designed the stimulus that should not be like one to convey a meaningful message nor a mere warning signal. We wanted to design something that would work on people’s instinctive reactions and blend into their awareness of the environmental background. To demonstrate this concept, we designed the stimulus utilizing a floor vibration that is not only a realization of the function but represents a phenomena expected to receive a response in the situational context. For instance, in one of the experimental scenarios, we examined this approach in an elevator scene, where a person is distracted and not paying attention to the view to exit the door. We also conducted the performance evaluation on the effectiveness of a system control method and its potential to transmit the haptic phenomenon to the person’s feet. Through this research, we confirmed that it is feasible to integrate the stimulus created by digital vibration into the daily living environment seamlessly. We learned how people would react to the designed stimulus in the way that they would unintentionally adjust themselves to follow the situation in their surroundings context. This finding provides us with the knowledge for improving the system design and application scenarios in future research. It also suggests that integrating a digital stimulus in the environment to guide people can be applied to various scenarios with appropriate stimulus design that matches the context.