SIMULATING SURFACE ROUGHNESS IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS BY VIBRO-TACTILE FEEDBACK

One of the most important objectives of virtual environments is to provide an immersive rendering of real-world objects. It is assumed that human performance will be best if the operator is able to see, to touch, and to manipulate objects as he would do in everyday life. The main emphasis of this work is put on the immersive design of haptic feedback; thereby particularly the simulation of surface roughness in virtual scenarios is regarded in more detail. Below, both the actuator concept and the rendering approach of such a system are proposed (see Section 1). Afterwards the results of an experimental evaluation are presented (see Section 2, 3) and its impact on further research activities is discussed (see Section 4).