Skin Drag Displays

Abstract

We propose a new type of tactile displays that drag a physical tactor across the skin in 2D. We call this skin drag. We demonstrate how this allows us to communicate geometric shapes or characters to users. The main benefit of our approach is that it simultaneously produces two types of stimuli, i.e., (1) it moves a tactile stimulus across skin locations and (2) it stretches the user's skin. Skin drag thereby combines the essential stimuli produced by vibrotactile and skin stretch. In our study, skin drag allowed participants to recognize tactile shapes significantly better than a vibrotactile array of comparable size. We present two arm-worn prototype devices that implement our concept.

Sampling Strategy for Ultrasonic Mid-Air Haptics

“…Moving points, providing richer information (such as start & end locations, direction of motion and rate of movement, all of which are masked at higher speeds), are better recognised than multi-points pattern. This has already been demonstrated for contact devices by Ion et al [8] who used unistroke patterns. We believe the distinction to hold between low and high frequency mid-air tactile patterns too.…”

MAGHair: A Wearable System to Create Unique Tactile Feedback by Stimulating Only the Body Hair

“…However, instead of asking the users to draw what they perceived [4], we used a "multiple choice" approach, with training on the multiple shapes, following a similar approach to previous work [11]. The results showed a low discriminative sensation, and do not deviate much from previous research evaluating shape discrimination on a forearm [4,11] Shape discrimination performance might be better when the presented shapes are larger. However, due to the limited form factor of our apparatus, we did not test this hypothesis in our current work.…”

“…Smartwatch: Wristbands and smartwatches already incorporate haptic interfaces, such as vibration motors, and there has been a growing interest in HCI to add different types of haptic feedback. Examples include air poking [25] or skin dragging [11]. MAGHair could add value to the existing form factor of a watch by adding extra layers and internal coils to the existing PCBs.…”

HapticSnakes: multi-haptic feedback wearable robots for immersive virtual reality

“…Numerous works presented vibrotactile systems for the torso using vests (Lindeman et al 2004;Konishi et al 2016;Jones et al 2004;Wu et al 2010). While vibrotactile feedback has a wide array of applications, it remains limited; as vibrations cannot stimulate sensations like shear forces or strong impact (Ion et al 2015). Also, feedback is constrained to the area where the vibrotactile motors are fixed on.…”