Information display by haptic bumps Affichage d'informations par des impulsions haptiques

Our goal was to find haptic effects that could be used to present information to the user of a haptic pointing device. We present a study on users’ ability to discriminate between different effects presented with a PHANToM haptic pointing device. The effects we experimented with were bumps that the user could feel through the PHANToM. The direction and the amplitude of the bumps were manipulated. The results show that the direction is easy to discriminate, but the amplitude is not. Only two levels of amplitude could be reliably discriminated.