Abstract
Haptic sensation of a material can be modulated by its visual appearance. A technique that utilizes this visual-haptic interaction is called as pseudo-haptic feedback. Conventional studies have investigated pseudo-haptic feedback in situations, wherein a user manipulated a virtual object using a computer mouse, a force-feedback device, etc. The present study investigated whether and how it was possible to offer pseudo-haptic feedback to a user who manipulated a virtual object using keystrokes. Participants moved a cursor toward a destination by pressing a key. While the cursor was moving, the cursor was temporarily slowed down on a square area of the screen. The participants’ task was to report, on a five-point scale, how much resistance they felt to the cursor’s movement. In addition to the basic speed of the cursor, the ratio of the basic speed to the speed within the square area was varied. In Experiment 1, we found that these two factors interacted significantly with each other, but further analysis showed that the cursor speed within the square area was the most important determinant of perceived resistance. In Experiment 2, consistent with the results of the previous experiment, it was found that the cursor movement outside of the square area was not required to generate the sense of resistance. Counterintuitively, in Experiment 3, the sense of resistance was apparent even without user’s keystrokes. We discuss how the sense of resistance for a cursor moved by keystrokes can be triggered visually, but interpreted by the brain as a haptic impression.
Highlights
One of the important goals of the brain’s perceptual system is to generate coherent perceptual representations of the world on the basis of sensory inputs
In Experiment 1, we examined whether and how the two factors of cursor speed affected the sense of resistance
The results indicate that the presence/absence of motion paths outside the square area played a minor role in generating the sense of resistance
Summary
One of the important goals of the brain’s perceptual system is to generate coherent perceptual representations of the world on the basis of sensory inputs. Sensory modalities are not independent of each other (Shimojo and Shams, 2001), so the representation generated by the brain is in general cross-modal (or multimodal). Based on the cross-modal interaction between haptics and vision, it is known that haptic experience is strongly modulated by visual inputs (Rock and Victor, 1964; Singer and Day, 1969; Lederman and Abbott, 1981). Pseudo-haptic feedback (Lécuyer, 2009) is an information presentation technique that, from an engineering point of view, aims to modulate haptic sensations by changing visual appearance. Changing the visual appearance of the visual object often provides illusory haptic sensations to the users manipulating the object.
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