Fabric Thermal Display using Ultrasonic Waves

This paper presents a fabric-based thermal display of a polyester fabric material combined with thermally-conductive materials using an ultrasound haptic display. We first empirically test the thermal generation process in five fabric materials by applying 40 kHz ultrasonic waves to the fabric materials. We also examine their thermal characteristics by applying different frequencies and amplitudes of ultrasonic cues. We show that polyester demonstrates the best thermal performance. We then combine it with thermally-conductive materials, including copper and aluminum, and compare them with the fabric-only condition. Two user studies show that our approach of combining a fabric material with copper and aluminum outperforms fabric-only conditions in thermal perception and thermal level identification. We integrate polyester with aluminum into a glove to explore the use cases in VR and share our findings, insights, limitations, and future works.