Abstract
"Smart Finger" is a novel type of tactile display for Augmented Reality (AR) that is wearable, like a press-on fingernail. This device allows the user to feel various textures while tracing his or her fingers along smooth objects. This wearable AR interface can supplement bump mapping information to real objects.
Categories: Emerging Technologies
Keywords: Tactile display, Bump mapping,
Wearable device, SmartTool, Parasitic Humanoid
1 Introduction
The
“SmartFinger” is a new type of tactile display for AR which is worn on the
nail side of the finger. It does not inhibit our tactile sensation, since the
ball of the finger is naked and we can feel the environment directly. The absence of any material between
the object and the finger is a critical aspect of this design.
The
“SmartFinger” can provide extra tactile sensations. For example, someone
wearing this small device on his or her nail can touch a drawing on a flat
sheet of paper and feel a virtual edge along the drawing’s line, and virtual
roughness from its texture pattern. This is a wearable device for AR, which adds bump
mapping information to real surface objects using existing printing techniques.
2
Exposition
We propose a small, wearable
tactile display composed
of three components: (1) photo-detectors to measure the
changing environment beneath
the finger in real-time, (2) a sensor to measure change in
the fingernail’s color from the nail side and detect the presence of external force, and (3) a “voice coil” to generate vibration on the nail, in order to
realize various tactile sensations corresponding to these two types of
sensory information.
3 Future Work
This research is part of The
Parasitic Humanoid (PH) project to develop wearable robots that model
nonverbal human behavior. A user of PH should be able to obtain data and analyze
the results without suffering any inconvenience in daily life. To realize such a comfortably
wearable PH, we need to develop measurement devices that don't interfere
with human behavior. The
SmartFinger fits this design criterion.
Of course, it can also be used as a hands-free
pointing device with feedback. For example, since visually impaired people make
extensive use of their tactile sense, they can use the device as a touch panel to
detect information from a computer display.
Acknowledgement: This work is partially funded by a research
grant from PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST).
The “SmartFinger”
The three components of the “SmartFinger”
References
T. Nojima, M. Inami, Y Kawabuchi,
T. Maeda, K. Mabuchi and S. Tachi, An Interface for Touching the Interface, ACM
SIGGRAPH 2000 Conference Abstracts and Applications, p.125, 2001
Mascaro S. and Asada H., 2001,
"Photoplethysmograph Fingernail Sensors for Measuring Finger Forces
Without Haptic Obstruction," IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation,
Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 698-708
T.
Maeda, H. Ando, J. Watanabe, Y. Nonura
and T. Miki, “A behavior modeling with wearable robotics -The study of
Parasitic Humanoid (VI)”, The 6th VRSJ Annual Conference, pp. 153-154
(Japanese)