The Influence of Texture on Perceiving Haptic Stiffness

Abstract

The sense of touch is essential to perform discriminating tasks in virtual reality applications or virtual training systems. To discriminate between different virtual objects, a human operator needs to clearly perceive the stiffness of each object. Stiffness is not only a material property, but also a characteristic of the particular object and express how it is being touched. Stiffness affects the perception of surface topography and depends on the area of applied force. While haptic-enabled virtual reality training systems have been received considerable attention in recent years, our main criticism on these systems is that their virtual environments provide homogeneous haptic stiffness and less perceptually accurate virtual space. This paper investigated how texture affects the perception of haptic stiffness of the virtual object. By performing a psychophysical experiment, we determined that human operator' average accuracy in discriminating perceived haptic stiffness of the virtual object is depending on its texture information and spatial variations. Our findings underscore the importance of implementing spatially varying haptic parameters.