The human perception of haptic vibrations

Abstract

This study investigated the human perception of periodic haptic stimuli (vibrations stimulating the sense of touch) within a virtual environment. The aim was to establish a foundation for a future channel of communication using the sense of touch. A kinesthetic force feedback device was employed to generate periodic haptic stimuli using Fourier series approximations of ideal signals. The human ability to subjectively differentiate these stimuli was investigated with respect to relative differences in signal power, or percent power differences (%PD). Two experiments were conducted with human participants to observe the ability of %PD to indicate stimuli differentiability. Stimuli pairs eliciting smaller %PDs were found to be less differentiable than those eliciting larger %PDs, with a generally increasing relationship. %PD appeared to be a potentially useful indicator of the subjective differentiability of periodic haptic stimuli, and could accommodate non-ideal signals. In general, differentiation rates of > 75% were consistently achieved above 30%PD.