[World Haptics Conference 2019] Seamless Phantom Sensation Moving Across a Wide Range of Body

This demonstration presents phantom sensations of 100-Hz vibration which moves across a wide range of body. Sitting on a chair-type vibrotactile display, which consists of four rows of vibration actuators, users can experience tactile illusions moving from a thigh to an upper back seamlessly. We also demonstrate a virtual reality application including egocentric tactile feedback of our phantom sensation.As a first step to produce the seamless moving tactile illusion, we calibrated the human vibrotactile sensitivity differences between different body parts by measuring psychophysical magnitude functions. Utilizing these functions, we present a new phantom sensation rendering method that uses Gaussian profiles of perceived intensity for smoother transition at the points of actual actuators. In this way, spatial continuity and temporal consistency of the moving tactile illusion can be supported. A user experiment was conducted to compare our method other conventional methods, and the results indicated that our method provided illusory motion of the best quality in terms of spatial continuity and temporal consistency.

WHC2019,haptics,phantom sensation,