A compact broadband tactile display and its effectiveness in the display of tactile form

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a planar distributed tactile display, and tests its effectiveness for displaying textures. The tactile display is composed of a 6/spl times/5 pin array actuated by 30 piezoelectric bimorphs. The pins lie on 1.8 mm centers. Vertical excursion of each pin is controlled over a 0-0.7 mm range. Perceptual experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the system under three conditions: active touch, passive touch with vibration, and passive touch without vibration.