FINGERTIP HAPTICS: A NOVEL DIRECTION IN HAPTIC DISPLAY

Abstract

“Fingertip haptics” refers to the direct exploration of a virtual environment with the fingertips, rather than through an intermediate grasped object, such as a stylus or thimble. This paper describes our investigation of fingertip haptics to date, and continues to study a novel approach to rendering slip at the finger pad. We use a rotating drum to render the velocity of a surface as it passes beneath the fingertip. Our previous work resulted in a prototype device in one degree of freedom that helped test two groups of 14 subjects on their ability to sense the nature of the fingertip contact sensation (i.e., whether an actual surface or a rotating drum renders the contact sensation). The experimental results in this paper show strong justification of our mechanical approach to rendering relative velocity at the fingertip, and demonstrate fingertip sensitivity to mechanism dynamics.