Study and implementation of a multimodal system to support virtual prototyping

Multimodal sensory stimulation is one of the most important challenges in human-computer interaction. When we want to play a virtual system it is important that the reproduced signals to stimulate the different sensory channels are synchronized with each other. This paper presents the study and implementation of a multimodal stimulation system. The proposed system is a step forwards a previous developed tactile platform (called Ipertouch 1.0). Main novelties regard the introduction of audio and visual feedbacks and signals synchronization. For acoustic stimulation, an auralization algorithm is applied on records of rubbing finger on a given class of material. For visual stimulation, a 3D rendering software is developed. Tests are performed to evaluate the degree of synchronism among the three different sensory channels.