Soft finger tactile rendering for wearable haptics

This paper introduces a tactile rendering algorithm for wearable cutaneous devices that stimulate the skin through local contact surface modulation. The first step in the algorithm simulates contact between a skin model and virtual objects, and computes the contact surface to be rendered. The accuracy of this surface is maximized by simulating soft skin with its characteristic nonlinear behavior. The second step takes the desired contact surface as input, and computes the device configuration by solving an optimization problem, i.e., minimizing the deviation between the contact surface in the virtual environment and the contact surface rendered by the device. The method is implemented on a thimble-like wearable device.