Report on Evaluation of Soft Tissue Interaction Demonstrator

The main target of T7.1 was the development of VR based demonstrators for soft tissue interaction. While D7.1 mainly focused on theoretical background, and implementation detail, this report advances towards the evaluation of the system from several points of view. The studies range from psychophysical evaluation experiments, to more technical evaluation of the approaches. An evaluation of the realism of the soft tissue interaction demonstrator was carried out in a simple indentation test. In two experimental studies we examined the fidelity of a simple deformation model for providing haptic feedback during an interaction with virtual elastic objects. Both experiments were based on comparison of the interaction with a virtual object to that with a real silicone object. Our results indicate, that using the simplified physical model for the haptic interaction with soft objects, we were able to achieve a high fidelity of the virtual rendering. We found that subjects could discern between the categories with a mean accuracy of 63% with no significant bias. TOUCH-HapSys D7.9 Report on Demonstrator Design Specifications 2