Towards a new tactile language to communicate emotions

Tactile displays are deformable surfaces that communicate information through the sense of touch. For virtual reality or telepresence applications we seek to restore the "basic" tactile percepts (roughness, smoothness, etc.), whereas for the handicapped people or in usual telecommunication field we seek to restore a "tactile language". In this paper, the fundamentals of a new tactile "language" are presented. The basics of this language are inspired from hand-written and voice recognition. All the steps to design such a language are presented. These steps are characterized by various phases of development and validated systematically by user tests. The obtained results show that the first elementary "tactile words" displayed by VITAL interface are well adapted to communicate "emotional" and "feelings" information.