We aim to contribute to the development of tactile-based pedestrian navigation systems that help users to navigate urban environments with minimal attention to the user-device interface. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a prototype and reports findings from (i) a lab-based study that directly compared features of two widely researched forms of tactile display: a waist belt and a back array; and (ii) a field evaluation which compared our prototype tactile-based navigation system (TactNav) with a visual mobile maps application (Nokia Maps™). Lab results indicated that the waist belt afforded significantly better performance than the back array across a wide range of metrics. Field results indicated that users' performance with the tactile-based system was equivalent to that with the visual-based system in terms of accuracy while route completion time was significantly faster with the tactile-based directional display.

Wearable tactile navigation displays may provide an alternative or complement to mobile visual navigation displays. Landmark information may provide a useful complement to directional information for navigation, however, there has been no reported use of landmark information in tactile navigation displays. We report a study that compared two tactile display techniques for landmark representation using one or two actuators respectively. The single-actuator technique generated different vibration patterns on a single actuator to represent different landmarks. The dual-actuator technique generated a single vibration pattern using two simultaneous actuators and different pairs of actuators around the body represented different landmarks. We compared the two techniques on four measures: distinguishability, learnability, short term memorability and user preference. Results showed that users performed equally well when either technique was used to represent landmarks alone. However, when landmark representations were presented together with directional signals, performance with the single-actuator technique was significantly reduced while performance with the dual-actuator technique remained unchanged.