Human perception of pneumatic tactile cues

Abstract

The ability to combine tactile, on-the-skin, sensory cues with the kinesthetic ones that widely available force-feedback devices are able to produce is a desirable one, opening the door to the production of more realistic, compelling virtual environments. Pneumatic air-jet displays can be easily mounted on existing force-feedback devices and we believe have the potential to provide useful complimentary tactile information. However, there is little concrete psychophysical data relating to pneumatic displays - a fact that hinders their adoption. This paper addresses this challenge, and presents brief psychophysical studies examining localization rate, the two-point threshold and the stimulus intensity of cues produced by pneumatic air jets. Using insights gained from these studies, we also present a more concrete application-focused investigation where we evaluate the effect of combining tactile and force-feedback cues in a simple object manipulation task in a virtual environment. We show that task completion times are significantly improved with the addition of tactile information, validating our ideas and suggesting this topic warrants further attention.