Experimental Study on Haptic Perception of Rough Surfaces Using MDS

The knowledge of the customer's perception of a product is a precondition to reduce efforts in product development. This paper presents the results of a study in which stochastic, e.g. leather-like, surfaces have been analyzed in terms of their perceived roughness using Multi-Dimensional-Scaling (MDS). 100 naive, male and female subjects, aged 16-72 were asked to evaluate the roughness of 24 different surfaces. Focus of this study was to analyze the effect of demographic factors such as age and gender on the haptic perception of surface roughness. The correlation between haptic perception and physical parameters (e.g. Rsm) is used to predict the haptic perception for rough surfaces for different customer groups.