Experimental Setup for Verifying the Funneling Illusion on the Upper Facial Region

The sensory funneling illusion refers to a phenomenon where tactile stimuli are perceived at a location where no actual stimulus is presented. This phenomenon can deliver diverse tactile feedback to users in virtual environments using a minimal number of actuators. In this paper, we propose an experiment to validate the occurrence of the sensory funneling illusion on the upper facial region of humans and develop a haptic visor capable of generating this illusion, along with a VR-based perception experiment application. The haptic visor includes four linear resonance actuators, which are attached to each corner of the facial interface of the head-mounted display. The experiment comprises three sessions designed to acclimate subjects to the experimental application, provide preliminary learning of the funneling illusion, and conduct the perception test. Tactile feedback generated by the actuators is transmitted to 12 perception locations in the upper facial region of the subjects. If the proposed experiment verifies the sensory funneling illusion on the face, it is expected that this phenomenon can be leveraged to create more immersive virtual environments with fewer actuators.