Vibrotactile display for hand-held devices and its preferable pattern generation

In this paper, a vibrotactile pad system, T-mobile is developed to provide vibrotactile cues for hand-held devices. A grooved and slim design is adapted to the back-side plane of the T-mobile, and the contact part consists of 12 vibrotactile panels which can operate independently and separately. To be isolated among vibrotactile actuators, the surface of the cover is divided into several pieces. Each vibrating module consists of a linear resonant actuator, a section of covering surface, and a vibration isolator. In order to provide spatial and directional information, sensory saltation and phantom sensation are applied to the T-mobile. For evaluating the developed device, two experiments were conducted to test whether directional information and spatial information can be successfully displayed by the device. Additionally, in order to find optimal stimulation by sensory saltation, an empirical test was conducted. As a result, spatial and directional information would be useful for displaying intuitive information for hand-held device with vibrotactile feedback and reasonable near-optimal value for sensory saltation was obtained.