Assessing the Efficacy of Variable Compliance Tactile Displays

Tactile displays based on pin arrays are challenging to design because they require a large number of individually controllable pins, or "tactors". A semi-active approach such as variable compliance could lead to improvements in tactor density, power consumption, size, and weight. However, the effectiveness of such an approach at conveying information to the user has not previously been studied. This paper presents an experiment that compares the performance of height varying and compliance varying pin arrays. It was found that users of a variable compliance pin array took at least 1.41 times longer to determine the shape of a displayed object than when using a variable height pin array, and this decision time increases with tactor stiffness