Benefits of Perceptually Transparent Vibration Rendering in Mobile Device

In general, an input/output (I/O) relation from a command sent to a haptic interface to a resulting percept forms a complicated function, due to the complexity of the haptic interface dynamics and the associated perception process. However, if such I/O relation can be found, using its inverse will allow haptic effects designed in terms of a target percept to be autonomously converted to corresponding device commands, so that the desired haptic effects can be exactly perceived by the user. We call this rendering framework as perceptually transparent rendering. Previously, we showed that perceptually transparent rendering is feasible for vibration rendering in a mobile device with perceived magnitude as a target percept. As a follow-up study, this paper investigates its benefits through a psychophysical experiment. In the experiment, we designed a set of vibration stimuli the intensities of which were evenly spaced either in the device command (applied voltage; the current practice) and the target percept (perceived magnitude; perceptually transparent rendering), and measured the pairwise discriminability of each stimulus set. The results showed that the average discrimination scores of perceptually transparent rendering were always higher, indicating its superior performance to the current practice of mobile device vibration rendering.

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