5528 Fingertip Guiding Manipulator : Haptic Graphic Display for Mental Image Creation
Details
A fingertip guiding manipulator was developed as a haptic graphic display for blind people: it helps them create mental images of raised graphics and reliefs with stroke order. The mechanical part of the manipulator has 4-DOF (degree of freedom): a knob's horizontal and vertical position (3-DOF), and its rotation. Users are assumed to pinch the knob by their fingertips. Through fingertip kinesthetic sense, while foreseeing the direction of the upcoming stroke by perceiving the knob's direction, they experience the uplifted and fallen strokes by perceiving their fingertips being pulled in the horizontal and vertical directions. The direction-indicating function presents a preparation effect, and the leading function, a reviewal effect. Especially, the up-and-down motion resembles to pen's up-and-down, and the up-lifting function expands a representation capability from "single stroke graphics" to "multiple stroke graphics.
