Design of a Tactile Curved Surface Display Based on Human Visual and Tactile Sensory Fusion

In general, there is no good hardware of tactile curved surface display for tele-robot and virtual reality, because to present the curvature of the curved surface with continuous values is too difficult. On other hand, in the psychophysical studies, human visual and tactile sensations have illusory fusion characteristics. Namely, the human sensory quantity on size, position and orientation of object is different from the real quantity. Therefore, we can recognize curved surface of real objects through visual and tactile sensations, even if exact tactile information is not presented. Furthermore the visual information is realize easily by computer graphical technology. So, by utilizing human characteristics of sensory illusory fusion, realization of the tactile curved surface display can be simplified. In this study, human fusion characteristics are measured by psychological experiments, and a tactile curved surface display is designed based on the results of the experiments. In the designed tactile display, only some curved patterns are utilized of instead of presenting many curved surface patterns. Namely, using the human sensory fusion characteristics on visual and tactile sensory fusion, the display of tactile curved surface is simplified.