Development of Knife-Shaped Interaction Device Providing Virtual Tactile Sensation

We have been developing “ToolDevice,” a set of devices to help novice users in performing various operations in a mixed reality (MR) space. ToolDevice imitates the familiar shapes, tactile sensation, and operational feedback sounds of hand tools that are used in everyday life. For example, we developed BrushDevice, KnifeDevice, TweezersDevice, and HammerDevice. Currently, KnifeDevice is insufficiency in force feedback. This paper proposes a tactile feedback model for cutting a virtual object utilizing two vibration motors and the principles of phantom sensation. We built a prototype to implement the proposed feedback model, and confirmed the usability of our model through an experiment. Finally, we redesigned KnifeDevice and implemented the tactile sensation on the basis of the results of the experiment.