Tactile Perception of Objects by the User's Palm for the Development of Multi-contact Wearable Tactile Displays
This work addresses the problem of designing multi-contact wearable tactile displays for the palm, particularly for Virtual Reality applications, but it is incremental as it provides foundational data without a novel method.
The study tackled the lack of human palm data for tactile display design by measuring interaction areas and forces using an array of Force Sensitive Resistors on the palm during contact with convex surfaces, identifying active areas for different forces.
The user's palm plays an important role in object detection and manipulation. The design of a robust multi-contact tactile display must consider the sensation and perception of of the stimulated area aiming to deliver the right stimuli at the correct location. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study to obtain the human palm data for this purpose. The objective of this work is to introduce the method to investigate the user's palm sensations during the interaction with objects. An array of fifteen Force Sensitive Resistors (FSRs) was located at the user's palm to get the area of interaction, and the normal force delivered to four different convex surfaces. Experimental results showed the active areas at the palm during the interaction with each of the surfaces at different forces. The obtained results can be applied in the development of multi-contact wearable tactile and haptic displays for the palm, and in training a machine-learning algorithm to predict stimuli aiming to achieve a highly immersive experience in Virtual Reality.