Understanding and misleading texture perception by rendering vibrational tactile stimuli

Among the mechanical stimuli that arise in the tactile interaction between finger and surface during the tactile exploration, stimulating the mechanoreceptors, Friction-Induced Vibrations (FIV) play a fundamental role in discriminating the surface textures. Although it is well known that vibrational tactile stimuli strongly depend on the characteristics of the explored textures, the correlation between the different FIV features (such as amplitude and spectral distribution) with the texture perception and discrimination is still an open field of research. A vibrotactile rendering device has been here used to replicate the FIV measured when exploring isotropic textures. A sensory campaign has been conducted on 10 participants to investigate their ability to discriminate real and rendered isotropic textures, while the reproduced FIV have been manipulated and altered to mislead tactile perception. By swapping the FIV amplitudes measured from real textures, it has been observed that the participants discriminate the samples consistently with the vibration amplitude. The campaign has allowed to correlate the FIV amplitude and its frequency distribution with the perceptual results of the discrimination campaigns on real and mimicked textures.