CHS: Small: Understanding the Percept of Soft Objects for Designing Naturalistic Touch Displays

我们如何在手术中复制触摸“软”物体的感觉，如李子（水果），或他人的手，或组织？这是本项目研究的核心问题。我们如何感受物体的“顺应性”，即它的刚性或柔软度，是构建高保真触摸界面所需的重要信息。除了在娱乐和个人生产力方面的应用外，这种界面还可以使外科医生能够区分胆囊和前列腺组织和导管与脂肪和骨骼，儿童可以感觉到父母的手，消费者可以检查和比较产品，服装和工件。该项目旨在了解指垫提供的触摸界面如何在空间和时间上变形，以充分传达自然的顺应感。对皮肤变形的适当控制将为触摸式显示器的设计提供信息，这些触摸式显示器感觉自然，机械效率高，可快速配置，并且响应灵敏。这个项目探讨了指垫表面的时间依赖性线索与顺应性或柔软性之间的联系。中心假设是，时间相关的线索，或信息的变化率的皮肤变形的空间领域，管理的编码的遵守。有了这些信息，这个项目的目的是再现这些皮肤变形线索与动态显示。三个研究任务计划实现这些目标：（一）人类的自然物体，如水果和组织的歧视任务：在这里，基于墨水的程序将表征接触面积，力和位移关系。(ii)生成皮肤变形提示和手指运动学：为此，工程设计的弹性刺激将复制自然的相互作用，但消除每个刺激的可变性。将开发新的人类受试者范例、成像设备和数据分析算法，以表征3D中的连续皮肤变形和拉伸。时空线索的相对重要性将使用多维缩放进行分析。(iii)再现关键的柔软度感知：将使用有限元分析设计柔软、透明、多腔室的液压致动器，以产生对皮肤变形的动态、动态控制。总的来说，这个项目旨在抽象皮肤线索的基础上的遵守，类似于视觉，其中颜色是波长在物理空间，但色调，饱和度和亮度在心理空间。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得的支持，通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

How can we replicate the sensation of touching a "soft" object such as a plum (fruit), or another's hand, or tissue during surgery? This is the central research question addressed in this project. How we feel an object's "compliance", that is, its rigidity or softness, is an important piece of information needed for building high fidelity touch interfaces. In addition to applications in entertainment and personal productivity, such interfaces could enable surgeons to distinguish gallbladder and prostate tissue and ducts from fat and bone, small children to feel a parent's hand, and consumers to inspect and compare products, clothing, and work pieces. This project seeks to understand how the touch interface provided by a finger pad must deform in space and time to adequately convey a natural sense of compliance. Proper control of the skin's deformation will inform the design of touch-enabled displays that feel natural and are mechanically efficient, rapidly configurable, and responsive. This project explores the connection between time-dependent cues at the finger pad surface and the percept of compliance, or softness. The central hypothesis is that time-dependent cues, or information in the rate of change of skin deformation over a spatial field, govern the encoding of compliance. With that information, this project aims to reproduce these skin deformation cues with a dynamic display. Three research tasks are planned for achieving these objectives: (i) Human discrimination tasks with natural objects such as fruits and tissues: here, an ink-based procedure will characterize contact area, force, and displacement relationships. (ii) Generation of skin deformation cues and digit kinematics: for this, engineered, elastic stimuli will replicate natural interactions yet remove per stimulus variability. Novel human subjects paradigms, imaging equipment, and data analysis algorithms will be developed to characterize continuous skin deformation and stretch in 3D. The relative importance of spatiotemporal cues will be analyzed using multi-dimensional scaling. (iii) Reproducing key softness percepts: A soft, transparent, multi-chamber hydraulic actuator will be designed using finite element analysis to produce dynamic, on-the-fly control of skin deformation. Overall, this project seeks to abstract cutaneous cues that underlie the percept of compliance, akin to vision, where color is wavelength in physics space but hue, saturation, and brightness in psychological space.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.