Electro-tactile device for material texture simulation

This paper deals with the simulation of material texture by means of electro-tactile stimuli, which directly derive from real material properties. The research presents a novel tactile display by its hardware and software system architecture and the elaboration procedure to generate the stimulating signals, and validates the adopted simulation strategy by experimental testing. The tactile system elabo- rates data from scans of real material samples and gener- ates electrical stimuli to reproduce roughness and texture coarseness sensations. It also adds a coherent sound feed- back to improve the realism of the simulation. The re- search defines also an experimental protocol based on the theory of Psychophysics to carry out system calibration and tests with users. The scope is to validate the proposed tactile system as a new tool for material simulation, which can be adopted for material virtual prototyping in several fields (product design, textile and clothing, gaming and entertainment, virtual museum, rehabilitation, etc.). Experimentations have been carried out to measure the users’ response to our different material classes (wood, paper, rubber and textile fabric). Experimental results con- cern how good the adopted simulation approach is and the analysis of the human tactile perception simulated by the system. Main findings relate to the system performance and the users’ response in terms of signal recognition and material class discrimination.