Soft Pneumatic Haptic Wearable to Create the Illusion of Human Touch

The ability to deliver sensations of human-like touch within virtual reality remains an important challenge to immersive, realistic experiences. Since conventional haptic actuators impart distinctively unnatural effects, we instead tackle this challenge through the design of a rendering mechanism using soft pneumatic actuators (SPA), embedded within a wearable jacket. The resulting system is then evaluated for its ability to mimic realistic touch gesture sensations of grab, touch, tap, and tickle as performed by human fingertips. The results of our experiments indicate that the stimuli produced by our design were reasonably effective in presenting realistic human-generated sensations.