Abstract
As touch screen technologies advanced, a digital stylus has become one of the essential accessories for a smart device. However, most of the digital styluses so far provide limited tactile feedback to a user. Therefore we focused on the limitation and noted the potential that a digital stylus may offer the sensation of realistic interaction with virtual environments on a touch screen using a 2.5D haptic system. Thus, we developed a haptic stylus with SMA (Shape Memory Alloy) and a 2.5D haptic rendering algorithm to provide lateral skin-stretch feedback to mimic the interaction force between fingertip and a stylus probing over a bumpy surface. We conducted two psychophysical experiments to evaluate the effect of 2.5D haptic feedback on the perception of virtual object geometry. Experiment 1 investigated the human perception of virtual bump size felt via the proposed lateral skin-stretch stylus and a vibrotactile stylus as reference. Experiment 2 tested the participants’ ability to count the number of virtual bumps rendered via the two types of haptic styluses. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that the participants felt the size of virtual bumps rendered with lateral skin-stretch stylus significantly sensitively than the vibrotactile stylus. Similarly, the participants counted the number of virtual bumps rendered with the lateral skin-stretch stylus significantly better than with the vibrotactile stylus. A common result of the two experiments is a significantly longer mean trial time for the skin-stretch stylus than the vibrotactile stylus.
Highlights
As touch screen technologies advanced, a digital stylus has become one of the essential accessories for a smart device
Experiment 1: Haptic perception of 2.5D virtual bump size rendered by a haptic stylus
In the first human experiment, we evaluated the human perception of virtual bump’s size rendered on a touch screen with the two types of haptic styluses
Summary
As touch screen technologies advanced, a digital stylus has become one of the essential accessories for a smart device. It is hard to find studies investigating the effect of lateral feedback for a stylus to feel the sensation of a virtual object’s surface bumpiness rendered on a flat surface. Follmer et al proposed a tabletop display that can change its surface shape on which a user can achieve 2.5D geometry information of target object with bare h ands[7] They demonstrated that the proposed haptic display could benefit the interaction. Sato et al used a tendon-driven mechanism to provide a user with lateral tactile feedback on a flat surface[11,12] Such methods were limited in imparting an object’s geometric information on a flat surface with lateral haptic feedback
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