Virtual object manipulation system with substitutive display of tangential force and slip by control of vibrotactile phantom sensation

We propose a substitutive multi-degree-of-freedom force display method that utilizes vibrotactile phantom sensation (VPS), in which the tangential force is substituted by the VPS position displacement and the slip is displayed as the oscillatory displacement of the VPS position. Based on the proposed method, we prototyped a virtual object manipulation system that consists of two 20 mm × 20 mm × 20 mm fingertip-wearable devices with four vibrating pins, a magnetic tracking system, a potentiometer for finger position measurement, and a physics simulator. The preliminary experiments demonstrated the feasibility to display the mass of an object, the slipping-down of an object between fingers, and the reaction torque induced by the rotation of the object-grasping hand.