Introduction
Electrovibration technique can modify user's perception of a surface through the modulation of the sliding friction accordingly to the voltage applied. This web tool comprises a novel approach to virtual haptic rendering in electrovibration based haptic displays in order to provide realistic feeling of a simulated surface. The required voltage signal is obtained using a simplified equation, confirmed by the use of a finite element computational framework, able to simulate tactile scenarios on real surfaces, e.g. finger pad sliding on a grated surface, and also on virtual surfaces, i.e. the friction modulation due to the electrostatic attraction between the finger pad and the flat haptic display. A database was generated, based on the precomputed tactile scenarios on simple reference standards, for the use with a conditional average estimator method, to predict outputs for custom parametric surfaces. In addition, an experimental database obtained by active exploration of different surfaces, is utilised for texture rendering.
Animation of a tactile scenario simulation using FEM on a reference standard