An Evaluation of Human Sensibility on Perceived Texture under Variation of Vibrotactile Stimuli using a Tactile Display System

This paper describes an experiment on the evaluation of human sensibility by monitoring responses to changes in the frequency and amplitude of a tactile display system. Preliminary tasks were performed to obtain effective adjectives concerning texture presentation. The number of collected adjectives was originally 33. This number of adjectives was reduced to 14 by a suitability survey that asked whether an adjective is suitable for expressing a texture feeling. Finally, after performing a semantic similarity evaluation, the number of adjectives was further reduced to ten and these ten were used in the main experiment. In the main experiment, selected sandpaper types and 15 selected combinations of frequencies and amplitudes of a tactile display were utilized to quantitatively evaluate the ten adjectives using a bipolar seven-point scale. The data show that a relationship exists between the independent variables(frequency, amplitude, and grit size) and the dependent variable(perceived texture). That is, the change of frequency and amplitude is directly related to perceived roughness or essential elements of human tactile sensitivity found in the preliminary experiment.