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

这个项目一直在开发触觉反馈技术，可以在虚拟操作空间中呈现真实和辅助的触觉信息，以提高基于触摸面板的手持设备的可用性和设计。开发了虚拟操作空间，使用户在操作虚拟手持设备时，通过手指的触觉信息来体验逼真的操作。该系统由检测手指运动的传感器和产生触觉信息的执行器组成。触觉信息以力或位移的形式呈现。并且，通过执行器产生的触觉反馈，用户可以感受到对其操作的排斥力和摩擦力。触摸表面的刚度、纹理和三维形状也可以通过执行器移动的触摸表面的位移来表示。所提出的技术应用于基于触摸面板的设备，如智能手机或平板电脑。利用所提出的技术产生的触觉信息，计算机辅助设计除了可以处理传统的形状外，还可以处理与触觉有关的方面。基于触摸屏的用户界面的可用性得到了提高。由于可以在虚拟空间中进行形状和触觉的设计，从而改善了耗时的原型制作过程。为了提高触觉反馈的响应性和简化系统，我们还引入了被动触觉反馈装置，并通过制作了许多原型来评估其有效性。

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.