Effects of haptic texture rendering modalities on realism

In haptics, two major modalities, force and vibration, are used to model real textures and recreate them in a virtual environment. This paper compares the perceptual advantages and disadvantages between the two approaches by a user study. In particular, the perceptual similarity of a virtual texture to a real texture is rated using five criteria of geometry, roughness, hardness, friction and overall similarity. These categorical comparisons allowed us to provide general guidelines to appropriate uses of the two approaches.