Improvement of usability and efficiency of user interface design by virtual manipulating space with tactile feedback

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This project has been developing tactile feedback techniques that can present realistic and assistive tactile information in a virtual manipulation space to improve the usability and the design of touch panel based handheld devices. The virtual manipulation space is developed so that the users can experience a realistic operation through the tactile information given to their fingers while they are manipulating the virtual handheld devices. The system consists of sensors to detect finger movement and actuators to generate the tactile information. The tactile information takes the form of force or displacement. And, with the tactile feedback generated by the actuators, the users can feel the repulsive force and the friction against their operation. The stiffness, the texture and the 3D shape of the touching surface can be also represented by displacement of the touch surface moved by the actuators. The proposed techniques are applied to the touch panel based devices such as the smart phones or the tablets. With the tactile information generated by the proposed techniques, the computer aided design can deal with the aspects concerning touch in addition to the conventional shape. And the usability of the touch panel based user interface is shown to be improved. The time consuming process of prototyping would be improved as the design concerning the shape and the touch can be conducted in the virtual space. In order to improve the responsivity of the tactile feedback and simplify the system, we also introduced passive tactile feedback devices and evaluated their effectiveness by making many prototypes.