Tactile Representation of Image in a Plane Actuator

Abstract

Our study investigated the effect of vibration elements on the recognition of texture in a planar type actuator. A planar type actuator is highly advantageous in naturally conveying the texture of a graphic object on a large-sized touch screen display to a user, which can considerably improve the user's experience when interacting with such screens. In order to investigate the effect of frequency and amplitude elements of vibration on texture representation, we analyzed the texture image quantitatively and conducted a user experiment to find the vibration elements that best matched a texture. Experimental results show that controlling frequency is more effective in expressing texture than controlling amplitude, but in a certain frequency band, different texture can be represented by changing the amplitude only.