With advances in information technology, people spend more time on touchscreen-based virtual keyboards than physical keyboards. However, typing on touchscreens usually lacks informative tactile feedback and anchoring references to locate the right keys, and thus requires more visual attention. Most prior tactile keyboard research used single stimulus pattern, which was not enough to recognize different keys. The purpose of this study was to investigate the usability of multiple vibrotactile feedback patterns in an entire virtual QWERTY keyboard input. A set of highly discriminable vibration patterns was designed and associated with different regions of a virtual keyboard to help users to locate the right keys. However, the number of stimulus patterns might also affect the typing performance. A user study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the multiple vibrotactile feedback. The results showed that an appropriate number of stimulus patterns provided higher typing speed, higher typing efficiency, and lower error rate.

随着信息技术的进步，与物理键盘相比，人们在基于触摸屏的虚拟键盘上花费的时间更多。然而，在触摸屏上打字通常缺乏信息丰富的触觉反馈和锚定参考来定位正确的键，因此需要更多的视觉注意力。大多数先前的触觉键盘研究使用单一刺激模式，这不足以识别不同的按键。本研究的目的是研究多个振动触觉反馈模式在整个虚拟 QWERTY 键盘输入中的可用性。一组高度可辨别的振动模式被设计并与虚拟键盘的不同区域相关联，以帮助用户找到正确的按键。然而，刺激模式的数量也可能影响打字性能。进行了一项用户研究以评估多重振动触觉反馈的有效性。结果表明，适当数量的刺激模式可提供更高的打字速度、更高的打字效率和更低的错误率。