Experimenting with Haptic Attributes for Display of Abstract Data                  

Keith V. Nesbitt                          
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering,             
University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW. 2006. Australia              
knesbitt@cs.newcastle.edu.au                       

Abstract
Information perceptualization has been defined to           
include the three domains of Information Visualization,     
Information Sonification and Information Tactilisation      
[1]. While Information Visualization is a developing field  
and Sonification is an emerging field of study, very little 
work has been done to experiment with haptics for the       
display of abstract information. This paper describes       
some pilot studies designed to test the feasibility of using
three different attributes of touch to display nominal or   
ordinal data. These attributes are surface hardness,        
surface roughness and object inertia. The results are       
applied to the display of stock market data on the Haptic   
Workbench.                                                  





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