Development of Touch Valve UI with pseudo-haptics feedback based on vibration of tablet PC

Abstract

Once an accident occurs, it will cause serious damage to the surroundings and loss of life and social trust.Therefore, researchers studies for training system using virtual reality (VR) technology. The advantage of VR training is that it can reproduce accidents in operating plants that cannot occur in the real world, and trainees can train how to deal with them. VR training requires immersion to make it more effective. However, there is not currently convenient interface in VR training such as a valve used in industrial plants. Most common interface in industrial plants is valve so that if there is gap between training interface and actual interface, user cannot obtain immersion, for example, in case that mouse or keyboard of PC are interface for training system.To solve this problem, we aim to develop touch valve user interface (UI) which operability and feedback are close to actual valve by using touch panel and vibration presentation instead of reaction force as pseudo-haptic feedback. That operability and feedback near to actual valve will cause user perceptual illusion and can keep them immerse in VR environment.This paper explains our think why the operability and feedback of our valve UI can approach to that of actual valve, and the result of questionnaire which asked whether the operability and feedback of our valve is near that of an actual valve when vibration generates or not. The result of the Student’s t-test for paired data was df = 12, t = −4.382, P = 0.001 (<5%). Calculation of the t-test confirmed that the vibration that our valve presented is significant for user to percept feedback like that from an actual valve.