Pressing the fingertips into surfaces causes skin deformations that enable humans to grip objects and sense their physical properties. This process involves intricate finger geometry, non-uniform tissue properties, and moisture, complicating the underlying contact mechanics. Here we explore the initial contact evolution of dry and hydrated fingers to isolate the roles of governing physical factors. Two participants gradually pressed an index finger on a glass surface under three moisture conditions: dry, water-hydrated, and glycerin-hydrated. Gross and real contact area were optically measured over time, revealing that glycerin hydration produced strikingly higher real contact area, while gross contact area was similar for all conditions. To elucidate the causes for this phenomenon, we investigated the combined effects of tissue elasticity, skin-surface friction, and fingerprint ridges on contact area using simulation. Our analyses show the dominant influence of elastic modulus over friction and an unusual contact phenomenon, which we call friction-induced hinging.

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Whenever we touch a surface with our fingers, we perceive distinct tactile properties that are based on the underlying dynamics of the interaction. However, little is known about how the brain aggregates the sensory information from these dynamics to form abstract representations of textures. Earlier studies in surface perception all used general surface descriptors measured in controlled conditions instead of considering the unique dynamics of specific interactions, reducing the comprehensiveness and interpretability of the results. Here, we present an interpretable modeling method that predicts the perceptual similarity of surfaces by comparing probability distributions of features calculated from short time windows of specific physical signals (finger motion, contact force, fingernail acceleration) elicited during unconstrained finger-surface interactions. The results show that our method can predict the similarity judgments of individual participants with a maximum Spearman's correlation of 0.7. Furthermore, we found evidence that different participants weight interaction features differently when judging surface similarity. Our findings provide new perspectives on human texture perception during active touch, and our approach could benefit haptic surface assessment, robotic tactile perception, and haptic rendering.

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Electrovibration holds great potential for creating vivid and realistic haptic sensations on touchscreens. Ideally, a designer should be able to control what users feel independent of the number of fingers they use, the movements they make, and how hard they press. We sought to understand the perception and physics of such interactions by determining the smallest 125 Hz electrovibration voltage that 15 participants could reliably feel when performing four different touch interactions at two normal forces. The results proved for the first time that both finger motion and contact by a second finger significantly affect what the user feels. At a given voltage, a single moving finger experiences much larger fluctuating electrovibration forces than a single stationary finger, making electrovibration much easier to feel during interactions involving finger movement. Indeed, only about 30% of participants could detect the stimulus without motion. Part of this difference comes from the fact that relative motion greatly increases the electrical impedance between a finger and the screen, as shown via detailed measurements from one individual. By contrast, threshold-level electrovibration did not significantly affect the coefficient of kinetic friction in any conditions. These findings help lay the groundwork for delivering consistent haptic feedback via electrovibration.@en

One may notice a relatively wide range of tactile sensations even when touching the same hard, flat surface in similar ways. Little is known about the reasons for this variability, so we decided to investigate how the perceptual intensity of light stickiness relates to the physical interaction between the skin and the surface. We conducted a psychophysical experiment in which nine participants actively pressed their finger on a flat glass plate with a normal force close to 1.5 N and detached it after a few seconds. A custom-designed apparatus recorded the contact force vector and the finger contact area during each interaction as well as pre- and post-trial finger moisture. After detaching their finger, participants judged the stickiness of the glass using a nine-point scale. We explored how sixteen physical variables derived from the recorded data correlate with each other and with the stickiness judgments of each participant. These analyses indicate that stickiness perception mainly depends on the pre-detachment pressing duration, the time taken for the finger to detach, and the impulse in the normal direction after the normal force changes sign; finger-surface adhesion seems to build with pressing time, causing a larger normal impulse during detachment and thus a more intense stickiness sensation. We additionally found a strong between-subjects correlation between maximum real contact area and peak pull-off force, as well as between finger moisture and impulse.

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Certain ungrounded asymmetric vibrations create a unidirectional force that makes the user feel as though their fingers are being pulled in a particular direction. However, although researchers have discovered this haptic feedback technique and showcased its success in a variety of applications, there is still little understanding about how different attributes of the asymmetric vibration signal affect the perceived pulling sensation. Our work aims to use dynamic modeling and measurement to bridge this gap between the design of the control signals and human perception. We present a new dynamic model of a common vibrotactile actuator (Haptuator Mark II) held between the soft, nonlinear fingers of a human user. After anecdotally observing that actuator acceleration strongly depends on grip force, we augmented this model so that grip force directly modifies the model parameters related to finger contact. We present results from driving this simulation with widely varying asymmetric vibrations that produce stronger and weaker pulling sensations. We also present preliminary data from a user study in which participants rated the perceived direction and strength of the same diverse range of asymmetric vibration cues; grip force and actuator acceleration were both recorded for all trials. Comparing the simulations with the physical measurements and perceptual results validates our dynamic model and provides insights on how different aspects of the asymmetric waveform affect the perception of the pulling sensation.@en

Both vision and touch contribute to the perception of real surfaces. Although there have been many studies on the individual contributions of each sense, it is still unclear how each modality's information is processed and integrated. To fill this gap, we investigated the similarity of visual and haptic perceptual spaces, as well as how well they each correlate with fingertip interaction metrics. Twenty participants interacted with ten different real surfaces from the Penn Haptic Texture Toolkit by either looking at or touching them and judged their similarity in pairs. By analyzing the resulting similarity ratings using non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS), we found that surfaces are similarly organized within the three-dimensional perceptual spaces of both modalities. Also, between-participant correlations were significantly higher in the haptic condition. In a separate experiment, we obtained the contact forces and accelerations acting on one finger interacting with each surface in a controlled way. We analyzed the collected fingertip interaction data in both the time and frequency domains. Our results suggest that the three perceptual dimensions for each modality can be represented by roughness/smoothness, hardness/softness, and friction, and that these dimensions can be estimated by surface vibration power, tap spectral centroid, and kinetic friction coefficient, respectively.

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