Soft finger tactile rendering for wearable haptics

Abstract

This paper introduces a tactile rendering algorithm for wearable cutaneous devices that stimulate the skin through local contact surface modulation. The first step in the algorithm simulates contact between a skin model and virtual objects, and computes the contact surface to be rendered. The accuracy of this surface is maximized by simulating soft skin with its characteristic nonlinear behavior. The second step takes the desired contact surface as input, and computes the device configuration by solving an optimization problem, i.e., minimizing the deviation between the contact surface in the virtual environment and the contact surface rendered by the device. The method is implemented on a thimble-like wearable device

HapTip: Displaying Haptic Shear Forces at the Fingertips for Multi-Finger Interaction in Virtual Environments

“…Other articulated structures were proposed by Cini et al (2005), Tsetserukou et al (2014), Leonardis et al (2015), and Perez et al (2015). They rely on a structure made of parallel arms, which is attached on the finger and drives the position and orientation of an end effector.…”

Efficient nonlinear skin simulation for multi-finger tactile rendering

“…For this purpose, we adopt the contact surface matching tactile rendering algorithm of Perez et al [15]. For each finger, we test for collision with the virtual environment roughly 100 points sampled on the finger pad area, perform the contact surface matching optimization to compute the degrees of freedom of the corresponding cutaneous interface, and send them as a rendering command to the driver of the interface.…”

“…We have demonstrated efficient simulation of the extreme nonlinearity of skin using a biphasic model with strain-limiting constraints [14]. And we have proposed a tactile rendering algorithm that optimizes the configuration of a wearable cutaneous interface under the objective of contact surface matching [15]. The last two works have been demonstrated interactively only on a single finger.…”

“…4. Tactile rendering results using contact surface matching [15]. Left: Test points on the virtual finger pad, in contact (red) and not in contact (blue), with a visualization of the device configuration resulting from the optimization (in pink).…”

A Wearable Haptic Game Controller

“…DOI: 10.5121/ijgtt.2016.2101 engagement than traditional interfaces. More recent approaches have looked at directly stimulating the skin [19] with relatively small devices such as robotic wearable thimbles. Whilst this approach has been successful, the thimbles are not yet sufficiently small to be feasible to stimulate all fingers on a hand without becoming obtrusive.…”