Perceptual Space of Regular Homogeneous Haptic Textures Rendered Using Electrovibration

This paper is concerned with the perceptual structure of homogeneous and deterministic haptic textures rendered by an electrovibration display. Textures were modeled using 32 regular tessellations of polygons by changing the polygon, density, edge width, pixel intensity, and image reversal. We conducted a perceptual experiment to estimate the pairwise dissimilarities between the 32 textures using the cluster sorting procedure. We then applied multi-dimensional scaling to the data and obtained a perceptual space that accounted for the effects of the five design variables on texture perception. The subjective impressions of the textures were also rated against eight adjective pairs. We projected the rating results into the perceptual space to find adequate perceptual dimensions for the texture perception. Our results contribute to designing perceptually distinctive textures elicited by electrovibration with an appropriate understanding of their subjective qualities.