Psychophysical Influence on Tactual Impression by Mixed-Reality Visual Stimulation

This paper describes the influence of visual stimulation on the tactual sense in a mixed-reality environment; i.e., how a tactual impression of a real object is affected by seeing a superimposed image of a different type of material. If the behavior and the extent of such an influence, a sort of illusion, are investigated in detail, the objects composed of a limited variety of materials can be perceived differently. This would be useful in the field of digital engineering. Therefore, we performed various experiments systematically.

1 Introduction

Mixed reality (MR) technology, which merges real and virtual worlds, has thus far been investigated and implemented mainly in the visual sense. A user wearing a see-through head-mounted display (HMD) can see a composite image, made of a computer-generated image (CGI) mixed with a real scene, in front of him/her in real time. MR is a powerful extension of conventional virtual reality (VR) technology that can handle only a computer-generated electronic environment. MR is superior to VR in that not everything in the environment the user experiences needs to be electronically modeled. That is, only necessary items are electronically modeled, and they are merged with objects existing in the real world. Thus, MR opens up a new frontier of practical applications.