Visual and Sensory Properties of Textures that Appeal to Human Touch

Abstract

Some textures and materials are appealing to our sense of touch in daily life. What makes us intuitively feel like touching these particular things? Haptic invitations of such materials have rarely been investigated. The present report identifies the relationships between the visual and sensory properties of textures and their haptic invitations. We used 24 artificial clay textures that were varied along four visual factors, and quantified the degrees of haptic invitations of these textures using a ranking approach. Multiple regression analyses were performed to investigate the relationships between the degrees of haptic invitations of textures and texture factors. The surface glossiness and shape patterns of textures strongly affected the degrees of haptic invitations of those textures, but surface colors had little impact. As to the sensory factors yielded by semantic differential method, the glossless, dry, sticky, and simple factors strongly affected the textures' degrees of haptic invitations. Furthermore, we found that apparent comfort is intimately related to the attractiveness of textures. Visual and sensory factors captured 68% and 75% of the variance in subjective attractiveness, respectively. These results suggest that the visual and sensory factors associated with textures are useful for designing textures that people find attractive. In addition to these general trends of haptic invitations, individual preferences were classified into a few groups. The preferences of majority were affected by glossiness of surfaces whereas there were roughness-and smoothness-sensitive groups.

Haptic Invitation of Textures: Perceptually Prominent Properties of Materials Determine Human Touch Motions

“…Nagano et al [4], [5], [6] revealed that linear combinations of the visual properties of materials described degrees of haptic invitation with a degree of accuracy ranging 70-80 percent. They found that although glossiness and surface shapes strongly affect haptic invitation, surface colors hardly affect it at all.…”

Effects of Seasons on Impressions of Pictures

“…Impression is affected by many factors, including nationality [9,10], motifs of paintings [11], visual and sensory properties of textures [12], calligraphic styles [13], personality [14], and mood [15,16]. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet examined the effect of seasons on an impression.…”

“…Potential impression factors are often obtained from experimental results through the application of factor analysis [1,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. In their investigation into the effects of seasons on potential impression factors [18], Tamai et al applied factor analysis separately to the scores of females and males because there were significant differences between them and obtained the following four factors: Evaluation, Potency, Sharpness, and Freshness.…”

“…The semantic differential (SD) method is often used to measure the degree of an impression [1,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. The SD method uses subjective ratings of an idea, concept, or object by scaling opposite adjectives to study connotative meaning [7,8].…”

Application of Perceptual Evaluation for Skin Assessment of Threaded Skin

“…On the other hand, Nagano, Okamoto, and Yamada [12] determined the relationship between the visual and sensory properties of the texture and its tactile invitations through the texture study of artificial clay. The result showed that texture-related visual and sensory factors were useful for designing attractive textures.…”