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An empirical evaluation of different haptic feedback for shape and texture recognition

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An Erratum to this article was published on 19 February 2013

Abstract

The scope of this research is to evaluate three different haptic feedback methods for texture discrimination in virtual environments. In particular, a Phantom force feedback device, a custom-made vibrotactile dataglove and paper palpable prototypes have been used. This paper describes a new study which corroborates the results of an initial experiment (Martínez et al. in 2011 International Conference on Cyberworlds, pp. 62–68, 2011) and performs a more in-depth evaluation of some results of interest and, in particular, those based on gender. In the experiment expansion, the number of users has been increased, so both genders are even, and the texture identification strategies have been analyzed. Finally, statistical analyses have been conducted to assess the differences between both genders, showing a new path which could be explored with new experiments. In addition, the vibrotactile dataglove has proved to have a notable behavior in the detection of varying grating textures, and it is even useful to identify shapes.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the projects PEII09-0054-9581 and TIN2008-06596-C02-01. Thanks to the users who have participated voluntarily in the experiments.

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Correspondence to Jonatan Martínez.

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Martínez, J., García, A.S., Molina, J.P. et al. An empirical evaluation of different haptic feedback for shape and texture recognition. Vis Comput 29, 111–121 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-012-0716-x

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