Investigating the influence of temporal intensity changes on apparent movement phenomenon

This paper aims at investigating the influence of the temporal intensity changes of two low-resolution vibrotactile actuators on the apparent movement phenomenon. In our work, we exploit two human sensory illusions called funneling illusion and apparent movement phenomenon. By temporarily varying the intensities of two adjacent vibrating actuators located on the dorsal of the human forearm, we obtained the illusion of a continuous movement of one tactile stimulus. In this work, we investigated the quality of the apparent movement according to the intensity change of the vibrating motors in a linear and logarithmic pattern. Psychophysical experiments revealed an interesting relationship between the distance and orientation of the two vibrating actuators with the preferred intensity variation, which are presented in this paper.