In recent years, several researches of haptic devices have been conducted. By using conventional haptic devices, users can perceive touching an object, such as CG (computer graphics) by a force feedback. Since conventional haptic devices provide a force feedback from a single point on an object surface where users touched, users touch an object by point contact. However, conventional haptic devices cannot provide users with a sense such as humans touching an object with a finger pad because a finger pad does not touch an object by point contact but surface contact in reality. In this paper, we propose a novel haptic device. By using this haptic device, users can perceive the sense of the slope on a CG object surface when they put fingers on it without tracing. Moreover, users can perceive the sense of grabbing a CG object with finger pads. To perceive the sense of the slope on a CG object and to grab it, we mount the plane interface of the haptic device on each two finger pads. Each plane interface provides a finger pad with the sense of the slope approximated to a tangent plane of area where they are touching. In the evaluation experiments, the subjects in this experiment evaluated this haptic device. From the results, the subjects could perceive the sense of the slope on a CG object surface. In addition, they could perceive the sense of grabbing a CG object.

No abstract

Recently, several researches of haptic devices have been conducted. Haptic devices provide users with sense of touching virtual objects such as Computer Graphics (CG) by force feedback. Since they provide force feedback from a single point on an object surface where users touched, users touch it by point contact. However, they cannot provide a sense such as humans touching an object with a finger pad because humans do not touch by point contact but surface contact. We focused on this characteristic and developed surface contact haptic device. To touch a CG object in surface contact, we use a plane interface. It provides force feedback to the normal direction by being approximated to tangent plane on a CG object surface where users touched and the sense of grabbing it. In the evaluation experiments, twelve users evaluated this haptic device. From results, we see that users could feel sense of touching in surface contact and grabbing a CG object.