Abstract
Thermal perception is essential for the survival and daily activities of people. Thus, it is desirable to realize thermal feedback stimulation for improving the sense of realism in virtual reality (VR) for users. For thermal stimulus, conventional systems utilize liquid circulation with bulky external sources or thermoelectric devices (TEDs) on rigid structures. However, these systems are difficult to apply to compact wearable gear used for complex hand motions to interact with VR. Furthermore, generating a rapid temperature difference, especially cooling, in response to a thermal stimulus in real-time is challenging for the conventional systems. To overcome this challenge and enhance wearability, we developed an untethered real-time thermal display glove. This glove comprised piezoelectric sensors enabling hand motion sensing and flexible TEDs for bidirectional thermal stimulus on skin. The customized flexible TEDs can decrease the temperature by 10 °C at room temperature in less than 0.5 s. Moreover, they have sufficiently high durability to withstand over 5,000 bends and high flexibility under a bending radius of 20 mm. In a user test with 20 subjects, the correlation between thermal perception and the displayed object’s color was verified, and a survey result showed that the thermal display glove provided realistic and immersive experiences to users when interacting with VR.
Highlights
Thermal perception is essential for the survival and daily activities of people
The hardware part included the glove with four flexible thermoelectric devices (TEDs), 11 piezoelectric sensors, and an interface board
When the virtual hand touches an object with an assigned temperature level, the contact information is transferred to the interface board to operate the TEDs
Summary
Thermal perception is essential for the survival and daily activities of people. it is desirable to realize thermal feedback stimulation for improving the sense of realism in virtual reality (VR) for users. Thermal perception helps humans to avoid extremely high or low temperature environments that would damage the body Despite this significance of thermal perception, it is difficult to induce real-time thermal change in glove-type devices due to the limitations of the thermal source. The direction of heat flux can be switched according to the direction of current; this makes it possible to employ TEDs as heaters or as coolers based on electric control Owing to this characteristic, TEDs have been utilized in heat transfer systems to realize thermal feedback in wearable devices for VR and AR9–13. We introduce a novel glove, to interact with a VR environment in real-time, that senses the user’s hand motion and provides feedback through a thermal display that employs a TED (see Fig. 1). The base platform of the glove is the previously developed motion-sensing glove with embedded piezoelectric sensors at Scientific Reports | (2020) 10:11403 |
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