Application-specific evaluation of tactile array displays for the human fingertip

Tactile array displays provide the Human Operator (HO) of a telepresence or Virtual Environment (VE) system with detailed tactile shape information on his/her fingertips. In previous work, an ideal specification profile for tactile array displays has been derived from human physiology and the biomechanics of human touch. Existing hardware developments still have tremendous shortcomings compared to such a specification profile. However, evaluation strategies have too often neglected the specificity of the particular application: in many application classes tactile display quality is mainly characterized by a subset of specification parameters, while other parameters play a rather subsidiary role. This paper suggests an application-specific evaluation approach associating the display quality of certain scenario properties under certain task conditions with corresponding hardware specification parameters. Results can help to design future tactile actuator arrays providing application-optimized display performance. The evaluation approach is exemplified by an experimental investigation of the spatial pin resolution of tactile array displays. Experiments were based on four separate tactile actuator systems driven in eight different resolution configurations.