Rich Pinch: Perception of Object Movement with Tactile Illusion

Vibrotactile feedback is an effective and economical approach for enriching interactive feedback. However, its effects are mostly limited to providing supplementary alarms or conveying the sense of simple object presence or contact. In this paper, we propose a novel tactile feedback method, called Rich Pinch, based on the “out of body” tactile illusion for selecting and manipulating a virtual object using a two-finger pinch gesture. Rich Pinch uses vibration motors attached only to the two fingertips, but can induce illusory feedback, such as tactile touch/contact and directional movement, as felt from the space between the fingers. We first experimentally verify that the “out of body” illusion technique does in fact exist when applied between the fingertips. Then, we compare three different tactile rendering functions to illustrate different resulting perceptual scales and argue to use the tangent-based interpolation in its actual application for a better user performance and experience due to its near-linear perceptual response. Finally, we assess the user experience (focusing on the perception of the object movement of the selected object) of the proposed pinch method by comparing it to the conventional contact-based method. Our results indicate that, with Rich Pinch, users were able to perceive rich dynamic feedback, and clearly preferred it over the conventional method.