Using Vibration Patterns to Provide Impact Position Information in Haptic Manipulation of Virtual Objects

While standard closed haptic control loop used in haptic simulation of rigid bodies are bounded to low frequency force restitution, event-based or open-loop haptic, by superimposing a high-frequency transient force pattern, can provide a realistic feeling of the impact. This high-frequency transient can provide the user with rich information about the contact such as the material properties of the object. Similarly, an impact on different locations of an object produces different vibration patterns that can be used to determine the impact location. This paper investigates the use of such high-frequency vibration patterns to provide impact position information on a simulated long rod held by the edge. We propose in this paper different vibration pattern models to convey the position information: a realistic model based on a numerical simulation of a beam and three empirical simplified models based on exponentially decaying sinusoids. A preliminary evaluation has been conducted with 15 participants. Taken together, our results showed that the users are able to associate vibration information with impact position efficiently.