Skin stretch feedback for gaming environments

This paper presents the design and development of handheld gaming devices that provide a new form of touch feedback: skin stretch feedback. Our prior work showed 1-1.5 mm of skin stretch applied to the fingertips (or thumb tips) could provide direction cues with high accuracy. The direction of each cue corresponded to the direction of applied skin stretch. Haptic feedback via tactile skin stretch can be used to provide tactile gaming effects and directional information through the same interface used for game inputs. Tests conducted with devices that resemble modern game controllers indicated which grip style is preferred by users and how to present direction cues to achieve the highest recognition rates. The main contribution of this paper is to show an initial demonstration of the benefits of skin stretch feedback in a multimodal gaming scenario.