HAPTIC PLASTeR: soft, thin, light and flexible haptic display using DEA composed of slide-ring material for daily life

Recently, many wearable haptic displays have been widely explored aiming the enriched user experience through various application such as the virtual reality (VR) and Telexistence. Many such proposed wearable haptic displays so far are composed of rigid materials such as motors, voice coil actuators and speakers [Minamizawa et al. 2007]. Therefore, in recent years, haptic displays composed of soft materials such as dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) have been proposed [Koo et al. 2008; Park et al. 2015]. However, the polymers used in such DEAs have hysteresis-loss property as a main physical limitation, which results in different output displacement property during the actuation cycles. In addition, these DEAs consist of a property that requires "pre-stretching", i.e., a strong force is required at the time of initial actuation. As such, these properties requires specialized actuation mechanisms for DEAs to be widely used as haptic displays.