Visualization of tactile material relationships using sound symbolic words

Abstract

Although humans can richly perceive variations of tactile textures, the relationships among tactile sensation categories are not clearly generalized. Here we propose a novel method for classifying sensations for tactile textures using onomatopoeic words (sound symbolic words) in Japanese. The method generates a distribution diagram of onomatopoeic words based on subjective impressions of the words, and enables users to arrange and compare the tactile textures on the diagram in two-dimensionally visualized form. We describe two experiments performed to generate the distribution diagram and examine the validity of the diagram. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.