A fabric-based approach for wearable haptics

In recent years, wearable haptic systems (WHS) have gained increasing attention as a novel and exciting paradigm for human-robot interaction (HRI).These systems can be worn by users, carried around, and integrated in their everyday lives, thus enabling a more natural manner to deliver tactile cues.At the same time, the design of these types of devices presents new issues: the challenge is the correct identification of design guidelines, with the two-fold goal of minimizing system encumbrance and increasing the effectiveness and naturalness of stimulus delivery.Fabrics can represent a viable solution to tackle these issues.They are specifically thought “to be worn”, and could be the key ingredient to develop wearable haptic interfaces conceived for a more natural HRI.In this paper, the author will review some examples of fabric-based WHS that can be applied to different body locations, and elicit different haptic perceptions for different application fields.Perspective and future developments of this approach will be discussed

Somatic ABC's: A Theoretical Framework for Designing, Developing and Evaluating the Building Blocks of Touch-Based Information Delivery

abstract: Situations of sensory overload are steadily becoming more frequent as the ubiquity of technology approaches reality--particularly with the advent of socio-communicative smartphone applications, and pervasive, high speed wireless networks. Although the ease of accessing information has improved our communication effectiveness and efficiency, our visual and auditory modalities--those modalities that today's computerized devices and displays largely engage--have become overloaded, creating possibilities for distractions, delays and high cognitive load; which in turn can lead to a loss of situational awareness, increasing chances for life threatening situations such as texting while driving. Surprisingly, alternative modalities for information delivery have seen little exploration. Touch, in particular, is a promising candidate given that it is our largest sensory organ with impressive spatial and temporal acuity. Although some approaches have been proposed for touch-based information delivery, they are not without limitations including high learning curves, limited applicability and/or limited expression. This is largely due to the lack of a versatile, comprehensive design theory--specifically, a theory that addresses the design of touch-based building blocks for expandable, efficient, rich and robust touch languages that are easy to learn and use. Moreover, beyond design, there is a lack of implementation and evaluation theories for such languages. To overcome these limitations, a unified, theoretical framework, inspired by natural, spoken language, is proposed called Somatic ABC's for Articulating (designing), Building (developing) and Confirming (evaluating) touch-based languages. To evaluate the usefulness of Somatic ABC's, its design, implementation and evaluation theories were applied to create communication languages for two very unique application areas: audio described movies and motor learning. These applications were chosen as they presented opportunities for complementing communication by offloading information, typically conveyed visually and/or aurally, to the skin. For both studies, it was found that Somatic ABC's aided the design, development and evaluation of rich somatic languages with distinct and natural communication units.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Computer Science 201

Tactile Weight Rendering: A Review for Researchers and Developers

Haptic rendering of weight plays an essential role in naturalistic object interaction in virtual environments. While kinesthetic devices have traditionally been used for this aim by applying forces on the limbs, tactile interfaces acting on the skin have recently offered potential solutions to enhance or substitute kinesthetic ones. Here, we aim to provide an in-depth overview and comparison of existing tactile weight rendering approaches. We categorized these approaches based on their type of stimulation into asymmetric vibration and skin stretch, further divided according to the working mechanism of the devices. Then, we compared these approaches using various criteria, including physical, mechanical, and perceptual characteristics of the reported devices and their potential applications. We found that asymmetric vibration devices have the smallest form factor, while skin stretch devices relying on the motion of flat surfaces, belts, or tactors present numerous mechanical and perceptual advantages for scenarios requiring more accurate weight rendering. Finally, we discussed the selection of the proposed categorization of devices and their application scopes, together with the limitations and opportunities for future research. We hope this study guides the development and use of tactile interfaces to achieve a more naturalistic object interaction and manipulation in virtual environments.Comment: 15 pages, 2 tables, 3 figures, surve

Pseudo-haptics survey: Human-computer interaction in extended reality & teleoperation

Pseudo-haptic techniques are becoming increasingly popular in human-computer interaction. They replicate haptic sensations by leveraging primarily visual feedback rather than mechanical actuators. These techniques bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds by exploring the brain’s ability to integrate visual and haptic information. One of the many advantages of pseudo-haptic techniques is that they are cost-effective, portable, and flexible. They eliminate the need for direct attachment of haptic devices to the body, which can be heavy and large and require a lot of power and maintenance. Recent research has focused on applying these techniques to extended reality and mid-air interactions. To better understand the potential of pseudo-haptic techniques, the authors developed a novel taxonomy encompassing tactile feedback, kinesthetic feedback, and combined categories in multimodal approaches, ground not covered by previous surveys. This survey highlights multimodal strategies and potential avenues for future studies, particularly regarding integrating these techniques into extended reality and collaborative virtual environments.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

W-FYD: a Wearable Fabric-based Display for Haptic Multi-Cue Delivery and Tactile Augmented Reality

Despite the importance of softness, there is no evidence of wearable haptic systems able to deliver controllable softness cues. Here, we present the Wearable Fabric Yielding Display (W-FYD), a fabric-based display for multi-cue delivery that can be worn on user's finger and enables, for the first time, both active and passive softness exploration. It can also induce a sliding effect under the finger-pad. A given stiffness profile can be obtained by modulating the stretching state of the fabric through two motors. Furthermore, a lifting mechanism allows to put the fabric in contact with the user's finger-pad, to enable passive softness rendering. In this paper, we describe the architecture of W-FYD, and a thorough characterization of its stiffness workspace, frequency response and softness rendering capabilities. We also computed device Just Noticeable Difference in both active and passive exploratory conditions, for linear and non-linear stiffness rendering as well as for sliding direction perception. The effect of device weight was also considered. Furthermore, performance of participants and their subjective quantitative evaluation in detecting sliding direction and softness discrimination tasks are reported. Finally, applications of W-FYD in tactile augmented reality for open palpation are discussed, opening interesting perspectives in many fields of human-machine interaction

Principles and Guidelines for Advancement of Touchscreen-Based Non-visual Access to 2D Spatial Information

Graphical materials such as graphs and maps are often inaccessible to millions of blind and visually-impaired (BVI) people, which negatively impacts their educational prospects, ability to travel, and vocational opportunities. To address this longstanding issue, a three-phase research program was conducted that builds on and extends previous work establishing touchscreen-based haptic cuing as a viable alternative for conveying digital graphics to BVI users. Although promising, this approach poses unique challenges that can only be addressed by schematizing the underlying graphical information based on perceptual and spatio-cognitive characteristics pertinent to touchscreen-based haptic access. Towards this end, this dissertation empirically identified a set of design parameters and guidelines through a logical progression of seven experiments. Phase I investigated perceptual characteristics related to touchscreen-based graphical access using vibrotactile stimuli, with results establishing three core perceptual guidelines: (1) a minimum line width of 1mm should be maintained for accurate line-detection (Exp-1), (2) a minimum interline gap of 4mm should be used for accurate discrimination of parallel vibrotactile lines (Exp-2), and (3) a minimum angular separation of 4mm should be used for accurate discrimination of oriented vibrotactile lines (Exp-3). Building on these parameters, Phase II studied the core spatio-cognitive characteristics pertinent to touchscreen-based non-visual learning of graphical information, with results leading to the specification of three design guidelines: (1) a minimum width of 4mm should be used for supporting tasks that require tracing of vibrotactile lines and judging their orientation (Exp-4), (2) a minimum width of 4mm should be maintained for accurate line tracing and learning of complex spatial path patterns (Exp-5), and (3) vibrotactile feedback should be used as a guiding cue to support the most accurate line tracing performance (Exp-6). Finally, Phase III demonstrated that schematizing line-based maps based on these design guidelines leads to development of an accurate cognitive map. Results from Experiment-7 provide theoretical evidence in support of learning from vision and touch as leading to the development of functionally equivalent amodal spatial representations in memory. Findings from all seven experiments contribute to new theories of haptic information processing that can guide the development of new touchscreen-based non-visual graphical access solutions