High-Quality Texture Display: The Use of Vibrotactile and Variable-Friction Stimuli in Conjunction

The sliding of a finger on a material surface results in complex physical interactions. Tactile texture displays have been limited in their ability to capture the aspects of these interactions. As a step forward, we have combined two complementary types of tactile stimuli, vibrotactile and electrostatic, to deliver roughness textures with high realism. These two types of stimuli represent the surface roughness and friction. We then conducted an experiment where participants agreed that the experience of the texture presented by the combined stimuli was more similar to that of an actual specimen than that of textures presented by either type of stimulus. Our experiment indicates that combining vibrotactile and electrostatic friction stimuli, both of these have been studied extensively, results in high-quality tactile contents for surface texture displays.