Soft wearable thermo+touch haptic interface for virtual reality

Touch is an inherent source of tactile sensation in everyday life, followed by vision and audition. For rich tactile feedback, multimodal haptic feedback is necessary because a single touch simultaneously excites multiple types of tactile receptors. In this paper, we present a soft wearable thermotouch haptic interface (T²HI) that simultaneously and independently provides touch and thermal stimulation using only one end-effector, the thermotouch haptic actuator (T²HA). A T²HA consists of a pneumatic-based touch haptic actuator and a thermoelectric-based thermal haptic stimulator. A novel design for the harmonious integration of the two different parts with wearable air pumps was proposed. Finally, the efficacy of the T²HI with virtual reality (VR) was evaluated by a user test. In VR, users manipulated a virtual object, and the corresponding touch and thermal feedback were provided. The T²HI demonstrated that multimodal haptic feedback significantly enhances the VR engagement of users compared to single-modal feedback.