Wearable Soft Pneumatic Ring With Multi-Mode Controlling for Rich Haptic Effects

Abstract

Common mechanical actuators for haptic feedback are generally dedicated to creating single kind of feedback, e.g., vibrotactile only, the pressure only, or shear force only, [Choi and Kuchenbecker 2013; Girard et al. 2016; Pacchierotti et al. 2017]. This is against the fact that highly realistic fully immersive VR/AR sometimes requires rather complete and rich multi-mode haptic feedback. For instance, when rubbing your finger on a wooden desk, the fingertip simultaneously senses both the high-frequency vibration due to the roughness of the surface texture and the quasi-static pressure due to pushing force, and your brain combines them to feel it as a wooden desk. The lack of any of the involved physical signal may seriously deteriorate the realism. This may be one of the reasons why current haptic interface technology for VR/AR environments is not at the same level as visual interfaces.