Abstract
In product design, a surface texture is an important factor that affects a product perceived quality. To select a texture, designers often refer to sensory properties, e.g. roughness and smoothness, as well as engineering and economic information. It is, however, difficult to provide sensory properties of texture in an objective manner. One cause of the difficulty is the fact that the perception of touch depends on how to touch a surface, i.e. action. We call touch with action “active touch”. The objective of this work is to analyze the effect of action on texture perception and discuss the causes. We focus on a lateral motion with tip of an index finger. We frequently observe the motion when evaluating a variety of texture samples. We conducted a sensory evaluation experiment using eight plastic texture samples selected from JIDA standard samples. From the result of the experiment, we found that the figure speed and surface pressure between tip of finger and a surface affect the perception of texture. The effects were prominent when surfaces have certain roughness rather than flat surfaces. We discussed the causes from the characteristics of mechanoreceptors and physical phenomena of the interface such as vibrations and frictions.
