Whole hand interaction with multi-finger movement-based vibrotactile stimulation

Abstract

Humans usually use their multiple fingers for several types of whole hand touch interaction such as stroking and grasping. During whole hand interaction, multiple fingers show respective velocity behaviors, which may lead to respective vibrating phenomena. For realistic haptic rendering of fine roughness of surfaces during multi-finger interaction, we proposed a multi-finger vibrotactile rendering method using velocities of multi-fingers. For each finger, a virtual fine rough surface is represented by a sinusoidal vibratory stimulus based on velocity of the corresponding finger and a touched material. We demonstrate the proposed method through two types of application with a multi-finger vibrotactile wearable display. In a first demonstration, a subject touches a virtual surface in a computational 3-D environment and perceives fine roughness of it. In a second demonstration, a subject touches a real surface and perceives augmented fine roughness of the surface on which vibrotactile stimulation is superimposed to modulate the fine roughness of the real surface.