Texture Display Mouse KAT: Vibrotactile Pattern and Roughness Display

This paper presents a novel haptic mouse KAT (KAIST artificial touch) that can be used as a human-computer interface and offers the capability of displaying properties such as patterns, gratings and roughness. A small planar-distributed pin array is developed. The array can represent micro-scale shapes with various surfaces, such as gratings, grooves, patterns, shapes of icons, and Braille, and provides the user with cutaneous stimuli. Since the tactile display unit is small enough to be embedded into a computer mouse, we developed a new texture display mouse. The performance of its texture display capability was verified. In addition, two psychophysical experiments have been conducted in order to ascertain the influence of vibrotactile stimuli. The first experiment showed that vibrational stimuli could be effective in the perception of patterns while from the second experiment, the functional relation between perceived roughness and components of vibrotactile stimuli was obtained. The experimental results have been applied to the development of a test-bed program