Tactile pen for presenting texture sensation from touch screen

With the widespread availability of computers and mobile devices, we use them for daily communication by exchanging visual and verbal/non-verbal media. We obtain various information from multimedia devices, and such devices recently have a touch panel interface to allow a user to intuitively and interactively use them. A touch panel consists of a touch-sensitive panel and a graphical display, and accepts user's intuitive touch inputs together with visual and auditory feedback. With the employment of touch actions in such interface devices, tactile feedback will be expected, if we consider the manipulation of a real object. For presenting tactile feedback, some tactile actuators have been introduced recently, however these actuators require the reference from real objects to generate the appropriate tactile sensations, and the input data to be associated with the output tactile sensations should be precisely prepared in the design of such systems. This study introduces a tactile pen to work with a touch screen, together with an algorithm to automatically generate parameters from an object's picture for driving tactile actuators. A tactile presentation system with a visual display is constructed, and the validity of the texture sensations is verified by a user's experiment.