Development of a Tactile Presentation System Mounted on a Mouse

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a tactile presentation system mounted on a mouse. Since human tactile receptors are distributed on entire fingertip surface, the matrix typed tactile presentation device is essential for the virtual reality for tactile sensation. In this paper, a tactile presentation system was designed using piezoelectric ceramic actuators (PZT ceramic actuator) for pressure stimulator because they can control precise displacement. The key part of the system, a Braille cell presenting Braille dots, was an array of eight PZT ceramic actuators (displacement of a PZT ceramic actuator is 1mm/200 V). Three braille cells were mounted on a mouse to generate distributed pressure with 4-by-6 stimulating points. In order to examine the basic size of texture that the present device displays, recognition experiments were performed using virtual figures of 10.8mm to 104.9mm in size. It was found that if size of the virtual figures exceeded 26mm then human subjects could recognize the figures with high percentage of correct answers being more than 80 percent of correct.