“Recreating tactile stimulus for graphic image: basic study” by Nakatani, Kajimoto, Kawakami and Tachi

One of the goals for haptics researchers is to develop a multisensory display to convey not only visual information but also tactile information at the same time. There have been enormous studies on how to communicate sense of touch with various devices. These devices are able to convey a variety of tactile information, but it requires a rendering procedure to convert visual stimulus to tactile stimulus. However, only a few rendering methods which associated with visual information have been examined so far. In this study, a method is proposed to recreate tactile stimulus for visual information, especially by using the contour of the image. Because the contour is one of the important information for both vision and touch. As a starting point for a series of study, the stimulus duration of the shape and the perceived size was examined. Stimulus duration is one of the important factors because the perceived shape can be directly affected by that.

1. Nakatani, M., Kajimoto, H., Kawakami, N., and Tachi, S. 2005. Tactile sensation with high-density pin-matrix. In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, 169.