Texture presentation by vibratory tactile display-image based presentation of a tactile texture

The authors have developed a tactile display which has fifty vibrating pins to convey the surface texture sensation of object surfaces to the user´s fingertip. The tactual sensation scaling was first performed to obtain a linear sensation scale of the display by means of the JND (just noticeable difference) method. One-dimensional curves on the scale were displayed to investigate human sensitivity to an intensity change rate. A tactile texture presentation method based on the image of an object surface is introduced, and two kinds of experiment were performed. Texture discrimination is the first, in which the effect of texture element size on the correct separation was discussed. Then the sensations produced by the display and that by a real object were compared using several samples that had vertical lines and did not contain low frequencies. The results are summarized and further research directions are discussed.