Design and evaluation of Pokespace: A bimanual haptic interaction technique

This thesis presents a new approach to haptic interaction technique design in which haptic feedback is displayed with a device held in the non-dominant hand, while the dominant hand controls a standard mouse. I believe that this approach has the potential to increase the fluency of everyday human-computer interaction by enabling a more effective division of tasks between the haptic and visual modalities. These ideas are expounded in a set of principles intended to guide the design of such techniques. I also present Pokespace, a novel interaction technique which follows those principles. Finally, I describe a series of three user studies intended to investigate and evaluate both the design principles and Pokespace. The results of the studies, though not unanimously positive, confirmed that Pokespace has the potential to support interaction without visual attention, and suggested several improvements to both the interaction technique and the underlying principles.