A method of selective stimulation to epidermal skin receptors for realistic touch feedback

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a device to stimulate only the superficial mechanoreceptors in the skin, and report the feeling caused by the stimulus. We describe the principle of the selective stimulation using air pressure, and we show the selectivity is more advanced than that of our previous system using magnet chips which was presented last year. We experimentally confirmed that a sparse array of the superficial stimulators could display realistic touch on objects including finer virtual textures than the stimulator spacing.