Human subject experiments were performed to determine the influence of a visual display on the perception of haptic spring stiffness. Seven subjects participated in an experiment where they were presented with two virtual springs and asked to determine which was stiffer. The virtual springs were represented through a graphics display which they watched and a haptic display which they explored with their fingers. The relative visual to haptic stiffness was varied over a range. The results demonstrated that when subjects made errors in haptic stiffness estimation (which they did approximately 41% of the time), those errors tended to follow visual rather than haptic cues, particularly when the visual to haptic stiffness mismatch was large (30–40%). The results suggest that in some cases, visual cues can be used in virtual environments to compensate for deficiencies in haptic displays.
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