ABSTRACT
The objective of this study is to clarify the effect of the posture of a recipient of tactile stimulus and the direction ofthe tactile stimulus on the perception of velocity generated by tactile apparent motion. Ten subjects pa11icipated in the experiment in which an air-jet tactile actuator was used to provide tactile stimuli. The stimuli were presented on the palm of each subject. The subjects perceived a set of stimuli in five postures and four directions of stimulus, and they estimated the velocity and the direction of tactile apparent motion. The percentage of correct responses regarding perceived velocity was analyzed for different postures and directions of stimulus sets. The results indicate that no specific posture had an advantage for velocity perception; however, there were significant differences in individual preference for accurate estimation of perceived tactile velocity. On the other hand, for the direction of stimulus, the accuracy of velocity perception was not affected by the
Keywords: tactile information, apparent motion, velocity perception
Recently, tactile interfaces, which are user interfaces that employ tactile perception for input/output, have been the focus of an increasing number of studies (Hafez, 2007). However, tactile interface design guidelines to help optimize the characteristics of human tactile perception have not yet been fully developed. Hayashi et al. (2006) indicated that the fundamental characteristics of tactile interface dcsign are not properly understood. Moreover, very few studies have been performcd on the mechanics of velocity perception in order to establish design guidelines.
