Ferro-fluid based lightweight and portable tactile display for persuasive tactile cues including orientation and texture

Abstract

This paper proposes a ferro-fluid based tactile display, which is lightweight and portable but yet can replicate convincing contact orientation and texture information. Numerous studies have been conducted to develop a tactile display for providing convincing tactile feedback. However, most of the displays were limited in portability, and restricted to delivering either texture information with vibration cues or contact orientation with force feedback. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed tactile display is the first wearable tactile display which can deliver texture information together with contact orientation, and still be lightweight and portable. New design principle, introducing ferro-fluid, and minimizing moving actuator components with magnet, allows having light weight and compactness to increase portability, and enables providing both contact orientation and texture cues.