Tactical Telehaptic Communication (HAPTAC)

The use of tactile displays for intra-squad communications offers a number of advantages: they are non-illuminating and can be acoustically covert, the stimuli cannot be overlooked, and they can alleviate sensory bottlenecks. Implementing an effective tactile display for receiving standard intra-squad communications is therefore useful, but we additionally propose supporting flexible and natural multimodal transmission of intra-squad communications, and utilization of wireless, GPS, and electronic compass technologies to facilitate improving team geospatial situation awareness via the tactile display. Our solution is grounded by realistic and high-value scenarios and both lab and field experiments will be used to evaluate and improve our design.