2013 Volume 12 Issue 3 Pages 375-384
Some textures and materials are appealing to our sense of touch in daily life. What makes us intuitively feel like touching these particular things? Haptic invitations of such materials have rarely been investigated. The present report identifies the relationships between the visual and sensory properties of textures and their haptic invitations. We used 24 artificial clay textures that were varied along four visual factors, and quantified the degrees of haptic invitations of these textures using a ranking approach. Multiple regression analyses were performed to investigate the relationships between the degrees of haptic invitations of textures and texture factors. The surface glossiness and shape patterns of textures strongly affected the degrees of haptic invitations of those textures, but surface colors had little impact. As to the sensory factors yielded by semantic differential method, the glossless, dry, sticky, and simple factors strongly affected the textures' degrees of haptic invitations. Furthermore, we found that apparent comfort is intimately related to the attractiveness of textures. Visual and sensory factors captured 68% and 75% of the variance in subjective attractiveness, respectively. These results suggest that the visual and sensory factors associated with textures are useful for designing textures that people find attractive. In addition to these general trends of haptic invitations, individual preferences were classified into a few groups. The preferences of majority were affected by glossiness of surfaces whereas there were roughness- and smoothness-sensitive groups.
