Haptogram: Ultrasonic Point-Cloud Tactile Stimulation

Haptogram: Ultrasonic Point-Cloud Tactile Stimulation

Blog Article

Studies of the stimulating effect of ultrasound as a tactile display have recently become more intensive in the haptic domain.In this paper, we present the design, development, and evaluation of Haptogram; a system designed to provide point-cloud tactile display via acoustic radiation pressure.A tiled 2-D array of ultrasound transducers is used to produce a focal point that is animated to produce arbitrary 2-D and 3-D tactile shapes.The switching speed is very high, so that humans feel the distributed points simultaneously.

The Haptogram system comprises a software component and a hardware component.The software component enables users to author and/or select a tactile object, create a HID Lighting Kit point-cloud representation, and generate a sequence of focal points to drive the hardware.The hardware component comprises a tiled 2-D array of ultrasound transducers, each driven by an FPGA.A quantitative analysis is conducted to measure the Haptogram ability to display various tactile shapes, including a single point, 2-D shapes (a straight line and a circle) and a 3-D object (a hemisphere).

Results show that all displayed tactile objects are perceivable by the human skin (an average of 2.65 kPa for 200 focal points).A Oregon Grape usability study is also conducted to evaluate the ability of humans to recognize 2-D shapes.Results show that the recognition rate was well above the chance level (average of 59.

44% and standard deviation of 12.75%) while the recognition time averaged 13.87 s (standard deviation of 3.92 s).