Development of a force and torque hybrid display "GyroCubeStick"

Multimodal interfaces with the five senses attract a great deal of attention as for the next generation multimedia interface. Especially, the interfaces with additional tactile sensation and force feedback enable us to perform pointing and manipulation operations and navigation operations easily rather than the conventional interfaces without them. The display device using pin array and manipulation arms is the most popular to display tactile sensation and force feedback. The arms and wires restrict user´s movement and reachable area around the device base connected to the arms. These devices are relative larger and are not convenient for mobile uses. Therefore, in this paper, a torque and force feedback device of non-grounding and no reaction base on the human body has been developed, which displays the torque of virtual objects and normal and tangential force on the surfaces as the resistance force and tactile sensation.