DeltaTouch: a 3D Haptic Display for Delivering Multimodal Tactile Stimuli at the Palm

DeltaTouch is a novel wearable haptic display with inverted Delta structure for providing multimodal tactile stimuli at any point of the palm of Virtual Reality (VR) user or operator of remote robot. It is capable of generating 3D force vector at the contact point and presenting multimodal tactile sensation of weight, slippage, encounter, and texture. The BallFeel, BalanceIt, and AnimalFeel applications have been developed to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed technology. In the first user study, we evaluated the perception of tactile cues delivered by the haptic display on a participants' palm. The second experiment estimated the distinction in the perception of different forces generating by DeltaTouch on the human palm in a virtual weight sorting task. DeltaTouch can potentially bring a new level of immersion of the user in VR and improve the quality of teleoperation of the robot equipped with tactile and force sensors.

I. Introduction

Palm has a large touch-sensitive area and plays an essential role in object detection and manipulation. Nowadays, many different entertainment applications, games, and simulators that implemented with VR/AR technologies are available on the market. However, the most VR/AR applications have a lack of providing feasible feedback to the user. Many of these applications require to deliver the sensation of the object moving on the hand. To achieve a highly immersive VR experience, it is needed to provide multimodal stimuli to the user’s palm such as weight, slippage, encounter, softness, and texture.