DeltaTouch: a 3D Haptic Display for Delivering Multimodal Tactile Stimuli at the Palm

Abstract

DeltaTouch is a novel wearable haptic display with inverted Delta structure for providing multimodal tactile stimuli at any point of the palm of Virtual Reality (VR) user or operator of remote robot. It is capable of generating 3D force vector at the contact point and presenting multimodal tactile sensation of weight, slippage, encounter, and texture. The BallFeel, BalanceIt, and AnimalFeel applications have been developed to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed technology. In the first user study, we evaluated the perception of tactile cues delivered by the haptic display on a participants’ palm. The second experiment estimated the distinction in the perception of different forces generating by DeltaTouch on the human palm in a virtual weight sorting task. DeltaTouch can potentially bring a new level of immersion of the user in VR and improve the quality of teleoperation of the robot equipped with tactile and force sensors.