Usability tests for texture comparison in an electroadhesion-based haptic device

Abstract

Haptic displays have been gaining more relevance over the recent years, in part because of the multiple advantages they present compared with standard displays, especially for improved user experience and their many different fields of application. Among the various haptic technologies, electroadhesion is seen as capable of better interaction with a user, through a display. TanvasTouch is an economically competitive haptic device using electroadhesion, providing an API and respective haptic engine, which makes the development of applications much easier and more systematic than in the past, back when the creation of these haptic solutions required a greater amount of work and resulted in ad-hoc solutions. Despite these advantages, it is important to access its ability to describe textures in a way understandable by the user’s touch. The current paper presents a set of experiments using TanvasTouch electroadhesion-based haptic technology to access how a texture created on a TanvasTouch device can be perceived as a representation of a real-world object.