Authors

Yuki Abe, Kotaro Hara, Daisuke Sakamoto, Tetsuo Ono

Publication

TBD

Abstract

Guiding a user's hand along a 3D path can help individuals avoid obstacles and manipulate everyday items with eyes-free. While prior work focused on haptic approaches using robots, auditory approaches for 3D path guidance remain underexplored. We prototyped and assessed two auditory hand guidance techniques for 3D path tracing: (1) VERBAL repeating spoken directional prompts; (2) Follow-Your-Finger (FYF) using the user's index finger in moving hand as an embodied reference and sonifying whether the user should follow the index finger direction. In a controlled pilot study with 12 sighted participants under an eyes-free condition, VERBAL yielded about 1.5 times faster performance than FYF, while FYF achieved an error rate of less than half VERBAL's. We thus recommend using VERBAL for wider paths with fewer obstacles and FYF for narrower paths with higher collision risks. We also discuss the research direction for applying these findings to real-world tasks.

Paper

TBD