A hapto-tactile display for presenting virtual objects in human-scale tactual search

摘要

In the recognition of an object situated in front of us, we firstly watch it and then try to touch it to feel the tactile and haptic sensation to be perceived by our hands. Various virtual reality and augmented reality systems have been introduced with the growing computational powers, however visual and auditory information related with a virtual object is mainly presented simultaneously to a user for enhancing the reality. If we consider the real situation of a user to try to recognize an object in the living environment, tactile and haptic information is assumed to be rather important for the better interaction with the object. In this study, we develop a hapto-tactile display that covers the movable range of a human arm in the tactual search for presenting tactile sensation of a virtual object. We design and construct a tactile pad to be fixed at the tip of a passively-driven haptic arm, and the tactile sensation and haptic force are simultaneously displayed to a user wearing the pad in the hand. The development of the hapto-tactile display for human tactile search will be described in this paper, together with an experiment to verify the validity of the system.