A fingertip haptic display for improving local perception of shape cues

In this paper we present a novel haptic device capable of providing both kinesthetic and local haptic cues at the level of the fingerpad. The system is composed of a supporting haptic interface and a fingertip haptic display. The augmentation of locally displayed haptic information may improve the performance in tasks such as shape recognition by haptic exploration. In this paper the overall device is presented, and some preliminary experiments are reported investigating the role of haptic local cues in haptic perception of curvature