Exploring Haptic Colour Identification Aids

Colour identification is an important component of perception, but people with Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD) have trouble with colour identification tasks. Haptic colour identification aids exist but are slow to learn. To address this, we developed two new colour identification aids - ColourWrist and ColourVest. Colour-Wrist is a wrist-based aid that maps any single RGB input to 16 unique colour category patterns displayed on the wrist using four solenoids and a vibration motor. ColourVest is a back-based aid that uses a back-mounted 10 x 8 2D vibrotactile array to notify the user of the general location of a user-selected colour category (of 16 possible choices). We compared both tools to a control condition with two participants with CVD, and show that participants found ColourWrist and ColourVest "intuitive" and "useful". Based on participants' feedback, we next plan improvements for ColourWrist and ColourVest, as well as plan to study how they perform in real-world applications.