Abstract
Tactile illusions enable us to feel a real sensation of virtual objects by deceiving the human's brain. One of the illusions useful to operate in tactile display is velvet hand illusion (VHI). VHI causes a virtual texture sensation highly similar to the texture of a real object. The VHI facilitates to create virtually velvetiness or slippery texture sensation when a person rubs gently his/her hand both side of grid wires. In this paper, we describe the mechanism of VHI deduced by a series of paired comparison: the results showed the strongest VHI intensity occurred when the wire stroke r was almost equal to the wire distance D (r/D ≈ 1). Based on this mechanism, a pin-matrix-typed tactile display can be used as a VHI generator. In evaluation experiments, we compare the strength of VHI feeling generated by the pin-matrix-typed tactile display with the VHI feeling generated by the mesh wire and real feeling of velvet cloth using magnitude estimation. The VHI feeling generated by the pin-matrix-typed tactile display is almost same as that generated by the mesh wire.
