Designing skin-dragging haptic motions for wearables.

Skin-dragging is an emerging type of haptic feedback that coveys both precise spatial and temporal tactile cues through the motion of a small pin dragged across the skin. While past research focused on building skin-dragging wearable devices with different form-factors, and testing their feasibility, it is still unclear what the user's perception of such haptic stimuli is, and how designers should generate dragging motion-patterns for informative feedback to be presented on a finger. In this work, we attempt to answer these questions. We therefore asked designers to create dragging motions using changes of speed, direction and length. We then tested the generated skin-dragging motions with a haptic smart-ring, classified them and extracted guidelines that can be used to convey rich and informative feedback on the fingers.