Full freedom-of-motion actuators as advanced haptic interfaces.

The sense of touch conveys critical environmental information, facilitating object recognition, manipulation, and social interaction, and can be engineered through haptic actuators that stimulate cutaneous receptors. An unfulfilled challenge lies in haptic interface technologies that can engage all the various mechanoreceptors in a programmable, spatiotemporal fashion across large areas of the body. Here, we introduce a small-scale actuator technology that can impart omnidirectional, superimposable, dynamic forces to the surface of skin, as the basis for stimulating individual classes of mechanoreceptors or selected combinations of them. High-bit haptic information transfer and realistic virtual tactile sensations are possible, as illustrated through human subject perception studies in extended reality applications that include advanced hand navigation, realistic texture reproduction, and sensory substitution for music perception. Editor's summary: Our sense of touch provides a wide range of sensations that tell us about the environment around us, including many things that we can't ascertain using sight alone. These signals come from a rich collection of receptors that exist in the skin. Ha et al. developed a single actuator unit that can exert complex combinations of dynamic forces, including pressure, shear, vibration, displacement, and torque, to achieve haptic information transfer and realistic virtual tactile sensations. The authors demonstrate the application of this system in hand navigation, reproduction of textural sensation, and tactile perception of music, with a broader goal of using the actuator for biomedical and extended reality applications. —Marc S. Lavine [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]