Visual and Sensory Properties of Textures that Appeal to Human Touch

Abstract

Certain textures and materials are appealing to the human sense of touch in daily life. Well-polished metal surfaces and finely woven clothes may be examples of such materials. What types of texture properties appeal to human touch? What makes us intuitively feel like touching these? Haptic invitations of such materials have rarely been investigated. In this study, we identify the properties of materials that appeal to human touch and investigate the extent to which the linear combination of these properties can describe haptic invitations of certain textures. The findings of this study can be applied, for example, to commercial products in stores in order to improve their appeal to human touch. Such products potentially garner consumers’ attention. Furthermore, in public places such as train stations or commercial facilities, poster and flyer advertisements with such textures could be used in order to attract the attentions of passersby. Peck and Wiggins suggested that textures had positive affective influences on human attitude or behavior to brochures [1]. Their study represents an availability of textures that invite human touch. The use of appealing textures would be great applications of human factors research. This study is a first step in identifying properties of such appealing textures. Textures can induce haptic invitations through appearance alone. The visual factors of textures, which include surface colors, gloss patterns and surface roughness may directly induce haptic invitations. Moreover, haptic invitations of textures might be determined via human sensory processing. For example, perceived roughness or glossiness may influence haptic invitations of textures. Such factors are acquired through sensory evaluation of textures. This study began with the hypothesis that haptic invitations of textures were related to the visual and sensory properties of textures. Participants did not touch textures. They only looked at textures and judged their haptic invitation. We investigated general trends in the haptic invitation of textures. These avenues of investigation were grounded in the authors’ pilot researches with a small number of participants [2, 3]. The present article is a report of complete experiments with a sufficient number of participants and a newly designed experiment to test the impact of surface colors that generally influence human affections. Pursuing the effects of colors is significant because the color is one of the most common factors available for package designs.