TactGuide is a navigational aid. It helps the user get to the desired destination without infringing on those senses that are most crucial in getting there efficiently and safely, namely hearing and sight. TactGuide engages one of the user's spare senses, the sense of touch on the thumb.

Many navigational aids work by taking over the navigational process and reducing the user to a direction following mechanism. That is an ambitious and dangerous proposition: our technology is simply not smart enough to be in charge. One prevalent problem in such technologies is to make sure the technical algorithms have sufficient data about the ever-changing world in which the user travels.

The TactGuide design effort was particularly attentive to the division of labor between user and technology. We wanted the technology to be available "in the background" while allowing the the user to make full use of his or her general way-finding abilities. The design work also paid great attention to providing a minimum of useful data, assuming that few correct and well-understood data would be indefinitely better than lots of unreliable data. For instance, by providing directional hints at very low resolution, we allowed the user's specific situational knowledge to combine with the crude data points of the device and together form a useful action indication for the user.

Reference Paper

Tomas Sokoler, Les Nelson and Elin Rønby Pedersen: Low-Resolution Supplementary Tactile Cues for Navigational Assistance. In Conference Proceedings of Mobile HCI 2002, Springer-Verlag, LNCS series, 2002