Soft wearable thermo+touch haptic interface for virtual reality

Abstract

Summary: Touch is an inherent source of tactile sensation in everyday life, followed by vision and audition. For rich tactile feedback, multimodal haptic feedback is necessary because a single touch simultaneously excites multiple types of tactile receptors. In this paper, we present a soft wearable thermotouch haptic interface (T2HI) that simultaneously and independently provides touch and thermal stimulation using only one end-effector, the thermotouch haptic actuator (T2HA). A T2HA consists of a pneumatic-based touch haptic actuator and a thermoelectric-based thermal haptic stimulator. A novel design for the harmonious integration of the two different parts with wearable air pumps was proposed. Finally, the efficacy of the T2HI with virtual reality (VR) was evaluated by a user test. In VR, users manipulated a virtual object, and the corresponding touch and thermal feedback were provided. The T2HI demonstrated that multimodal haptic feedback significantly enhances the VR engagement of users compared to single-modal feedback.

Keywords

• Natural sciences
• Applied sciences
• Robotics