Comparison of human haptic size discrimination performance in simulated environments with varying levels of force and stiffness

The performance levels of human subjects in size discrimination experiments in virtual environments with varying levels of stiffness and force saturation are presented. The virtual environments are displayed with a Phantom desktop three degree-of-freedom haptic interface. Performance was measured at below maximum machine performance levels for two machine parameters: maximum endpoint force and maximum virtual surface stiffness. The tabulated scores for the size discrimination in the sub-optimal virtual environments, except for those of the lowest stiffness, 100 N/m, were found to be comparable to that in the highest-quality virtual environment. This supports previous claims that haptic interface hardware may be able to convey, for this perceptual task, sufficient perceptual information to the user with relatively low levels of machine quality in terms of these parameters, as long as certain minimum levels, 1.0 N force and 220 N/m stiffness, are met.