Distributed tactile displays for reproducing realistic tactile sensations

Overview & Synopsis

With the advance of e-commerce, consumer electronics, and virtual reality (VR) domains, there has been a great interest in haptic interfaces that can reproduce realistic tactile sensations and provide intuitive feedback. However, the existing tactile devices have limited capability, delivering only low fidelity vibratory feedback in most of the situations. In addition, limited knowledge of tactile sensing hinders the development of haptic interfaces that can provide realistic tactile sensations, requiring a lot of scientific and engineering work. The thesis work has a dual purpose. First, it addresses practical issues, that is, to design haptic displays that can provide intuitive and realistic haptic feedback with simple design. The work rests on designing distributed tactile displays that can provide complex spatiotemporal stimulation using simple yet elegant mechanical design. So, the display can be used in applications without complex hardware and precise engineering. Second, it has a scientific endeavor, that is, to investigate texture perception. This scientific part of the research is ranged around identifying invariances and essential cues that constitute the texture perception. Specifically, I studied the role of distributed tactile stimulation in texture perception and found that global characteristics of local skin displacements have behavioural importance. Distributed local displacements increase the perceived intensity and modulates roughness properties of virtual surfaces. Another important outcome of the work is an illusion of tactile slip. This illusion creates a robust sense of surface movement in the absence of the net movement. The manuscript describes all aspects of the thesis work, and chapters were arranged in a way that the reader can easily comprehend the work. My method was to have initial chapters that serve to present the context of the work and introduce the haptic displays developed in the thesis work. Then, subsequent chapters introduce the distributed tactile display and a robust illusion of tactile slip. The final part is about realistic tactile rendering using the distributed tactile display.