A Haptic Gaming System for Tactile Textures and 3D Shapes Discrimination

Haptics-enabled virtual reality technologies allow users to sense force feedback and tactile feedback while manipulating 3D objects. This paper proposes a haptic gaming system which can contribute to improve the ability for discerning tactile textures and 3D shapes by using force and tactile feedbacks of the users’ fingers. Our haptic gaming system consists of three games: “Haptic Puzzle” for tactile texture cognition, “Shape Puzzle” for 3D geometric object cognition, and “Position Puzzle” for 3D space cognition. Through a number of experiments, we have confirmed the effectiveness of our system on enhancing the tactile textures and 3D shapes recognition. The discrimination test of four haptic properties (stiffness, damping, static friction, and dynamic friction) led us to confirm that the users were least sensitive with damping property, and the damping changes were also highly confused with stiffness changes. We also found that the stiffness and damping properties are more influential than friction properties for discriminating the objects via the tactile texture recognition test. The final experiment demonstrated that the visuo-haptic integrated recognition was more advantageous than single haptic recognition. Moreover, this work showed the feasibility that the proposed system can be used for evaluating one’s haptic visual discrimination capability.