Seamless Phantom Sensation Moving Across a Wide Range of Body

Abstract

This paper reports experimental research aimed to provide seamlessly moving illusory tactile sensations across a large area of the body using a few vibration actuators. The human vibrotactile sensitivity differences among the body sites are calibrated using empirically-measured psychophysical magnitude functions. We present a new phantom sensation rendering method that uses the Gaussian function emphasizing the spatial continuity of perceived movement and the temporal consistency of perceived intensity. We demonstrate that our rendering method outperforms previous methods for phantom sensations via a perceptual experiment. Our method is tailored to eliciting the perception of illusory tactile sensation moving in a long distance, from the thigh to the upper back.