Evaluating a Multipoint Tactile Renderer for Virtual Textured Surfaces

This paper details a pilot study done to assess the effectiveness of a tactile rendering strategy. The rendering strategy addresses the tactile receptors in the skin via stimuli consisting of superimposed sine waves. To assess the validity of this strategy, subjects were presented with sets of four virtual textiles and asked to rate them in terms of similarity to a real textile. The results showed that 38.1±3.1% of textiles were accurately identified as the most similar, with systematic error patterns in the identification of textiles. We conclude that the virtual textiles are discriminable to test subjects, with 4.54±0.13 of the subjects consistently choosing the same textile, but in many cases none of the virtual textiles is a good match to the real textiles.

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