Using multiple contacts with texture-enhanced graphics

We present a multi-finger 2-D haptic display device to potentially provide the opportunity of parallel processing of coarse haptic information, with the intended benefit of improving performance in 2-D haptic object recognition. Combined with a novel method for producing “texture” image representations, we found that multiple contacts does improve performance compared to a single contact in terms of both time and accuracy. However, we also found no benefit for additional contacts with only raised-line representations of objects. This suggests that the use of texture made a key contribution in improving performance from one to multiple fingers.