Abstract
Modulating tactile texture perception for the surface of real objects is a promising way to artificially present various tactile textures. Here, we propose a simple method of modulating tactile textures for various materials, which is named the rotating-frame method. In the method, one touches an arbitrary material's surface through a hole in a cardboard frame. When the frame is rotated between the hand and material, the tactile texture of the material is perceived as if it has turned into another material. We investigated the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the illusory modulation created by the method in a series of psychophysical experiments. We found that the method altered the tactile textures of the surfaces of touched materials such as glass and carpet to seem softer, smoother, slipperier, and warmer than they actually are. The illusory texture change occurred robustly when the method was applied with different categories of materials. Our method paves the way for the development of simple techniques for texture augmentation that can be applied to a wide range of materials and do not disrupt stable direct contact between the hand and the materials.
Highlights
W E are surrounded by a variety of textured surfaces
The results suggest that our proposed method has the possibility to modulate tactile texture perception as well as, or even better than, the conventional velvet hand illusion (VHI) method
In the VHI condition, the horizontally moving wires crossed over the palm, which might prevent the participants from focusing on the tactile sensation above the palm and induce weaker illusory sensation
Summary
W E are surrounded by a variety of textured surfaces. The growing field of virtual reality and haptics engineering have increased interest in haptic texture displays to artificially present such diverse textures. Previous studies in haptic science have shown possible modulation effects of perceived textures. They showed that the evaluated roughness and warmth of stimuli touched with a finger were biased by other roughness-controlled and warmth-controlled stimuli touched with adjacent fingers [3], [4]. In line with these findings, a couple of haptic displays have been proposed that present stimuli at sites other than the contact area between the hand and the object.
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