Toward a Mathematical Model for Quality of Experience Evaluation of Haptic Applications

Abdelwahab Hamam

Abstract:

There is rapid progress in the advancement of
user interfaces. One such advancement is enabling the sense of
touch, or haptics, as part of the interface. Haptic devices are
seeing growth in many types of applications such as gaming and
medical simulation. Assessing the quality of experience (QoE) of
the user is necessary to evaluate how the user perceives such
interfaces. The QoE is a user-centric parameter that shifts the
paradigm of evaluation from the technology itself to the user.
This paper proposes a mathematical-based QoE evaluation of
haptic-based applications. A mathematical model that is able
to quantify the QoE of the user is described. By conducting
a user study in which users evaluate a haptic-based game
application, we were able to test and validate the mathematical
model. There are several approaches in determining the weights
to be used with the mathematical model. This paper presents
and compares different approaches for weight determination,
namely even weight distribution, correlation-based weights, even
weights–correlation combination, linear regression analysis, and
principal component analysis (PCA). Our results show that PCA
weight determination performs slightly better than the rest of
the approaches.