Title: Psychophysical investigation of hardness perception for haptic device development towards Kansei engineering

Authors: Koichi Nakayama, Juan Liu, Hiroshi Ando

Addresses: Universal Communication Research Institute, NICT, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, ''Keihanna Science City'', Kyoto 619-0288, Japan. ' Universal Communication Research Institute, NICT, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, ''Keihanna Science City'', Kyoto 619-0288, Japan. ' Universal Communication Research Institute, NICT, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, ''Keihanna Science City'', Kyoto 619-0288, Japan

Abstract: This paper describes our study on hardness perception of human fingers in order to find required system performance of haptic devices for hard object rendering. Two psychophysical experiments were carried out using an apparatus simulating different hardness levels by reproducing the trajectory of finger colliding with a virtual object. For a device to render very hard objects, the position control cycle should be shorter than 40 ms and the maximum acceleration should be at least 50 m/s². The Weber ratio of hardness perception was found varying with performance settings. A prototype of our portable haptic device was evaluated.

Keywords: hardness perception; Weber ratio; system requirements; portable haptic devices; haptics; kansei engineering; human fingers; hard object rendering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBM.2011.042816

International Journal of Biometrics, 2011 Vol.3 No.4, pp.337 - 352

Published online: 24 Jan 2015 *

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