Friction-varying tactile display with large working space for texture reproduction

Abstract

As the latest touch-based input equipment of consumer electronics, touch screen is a convenient and natural human-machine interaction vehicle. However, it has not separated from the scope of “interactive input”. Tactile display adds the tactile output along with the interactive input and helps the operator to perceive tactile feedback of texture, profile, etc., which increases the immersion of the operator significantly. In this study, a friction-varying texture tactile display which is composed of resonance module, positioning module and vision display module was designed by using the squeeze film effect. In this device, a piece of 194 × 100 × 2 mm transparent glass was used as the touch tablet, which can provide a large working area and is easy to be integrated with common consumer electronics. The feasibility and precision of the designed friction-varying tactile display in simulation of texture were further verified by a psychophysical experiment.