Mixed Feelings: Multimodal Perception of Virtual Roughness

Abstract

The texture of a real or virtual surface can both increase the sense of realism of an object as well as convey information about an object's identity, type, location, function, and so on. It is important therefore that interface designers understand the range of textural information available to them through current interaction devices in virtual environments. Previous work (e.g. [2]), has examined the perceived roughness of a set of force feedback generated textures (conveyed via a PHANToM device) in order to work towards such an understanding. In doing so, this work has highlighted the possible perceptual limitations involved in reliably and confidently judging the relative roughness of a set of haptic textures. How many textures can we distinguish between for example and how likely is it that we reliably judge any one as rougher than, less rough than or the same as the other? The work presented here empirically investigates the effects of adding auditory textural cues to the existing haptic textures. Does the existence of an additional cue (in the auditory modality) change the answers to our questions above for example? We propose that the addition of auditory stimuli will increase the potential range and resolution of texture roughness percepts available through force feedback interaction.