Quantitative evaluation of artificial tactile feel display integrated with visual information

This study presents a tactile feel display of virtual reality for subtle fine touch of clothes. The device developed using soft high polymer gel actuators could express subtle differences of touch of clothes, especially rough materials such as a towel and denim. Considering the superiority of vision in the multimodal sensational perception, a virtual tactile feel display integrated with visual information which express more real touch of cloth was proposed. In order to evaluate the influence of visual information adding to the tactile feel quantitatively, a factor analysis was performed using adjective pair scales. Factor analysis applied to the real materials showed that the roughness factor is highly correlated with the visual sensation although the softness factor is relatively independent from image information. The same analysis applied to the artificial tactile feel showed more complex results. It was confirmed that vision could help the recognition of tactile feel only when the characteristics of the material was expressed well by visual information although could also mislead tactile perception when visual information was not appropriate. The superiority of visual information was also evaluated by applying wrong visual information different from the artificial tactile feels.