Cross Modal Displays for Haptic Information

Abstract

Haptic Displays present information to the sensory modality of touch. Tele-robotic tasks that are usually conducted in the absence of information that we gather by the sense of touch will benefit greatly by the inclusion of such data. The limited size of haptic displays and the serial nature of the information processing make it difficult to present many kinds of haptic information simultaneously. Display designers will benefit from knowing which types of haptic information (information usually gathered by touch) can be presented using cross modal displays (displays that use modalities other than touch) without causing reduced task performance. This study investigates the efficacy of cross modal displays of texture information. Three displays were designed in each of the following categories: Visual - Pictorial, Visual - Graphical and Auditory. Three control displays - Touch Only, Sight Only and Touch and Sight were also used. Data from displays with matched sensitivity values were used to analyze the effect of modality on three representative tasks: search, averaging and optimization. Results indicate that low cost, low bandwidth cross modal displays are viable alternatives for tasks with an embedded texture perception component.