Haptic Illusions: What You Feel Isn’t Always What You Get

In this paper, we present the discovery of new haptic illusions, and a method for creating further haptic illusions. Pure haptic illusions were created by mixing force cues with geometric cues to make people feel shapes that differ from the actual shape of the object. In particular, we found that an area that feels harder to move through and easier to move out of can be interpreted as a region of high curvature. These haptic illusions were implemented into user experiments with a haptic interface. Preliminary user tests have shown that this method can be effective at masking true object geometry by making a circle feel like an ellipse and a straight line feel like a curved line.