Verification a of Haptic Illusions Using a Haptic Interface and Consideration on its Mechanism Paper: Rb18-4-2621; 2006/6/27 Verification of Haptic Illusions Using a Haptic Interface and

In these days, a haptic interface, which is a force/tactile display device, is attracting great inter-est in virtual reality. With regard to this technology, researchers have reported ways to construct virtual environment and development of new devices with a unique mechanism but rarely explored the relation-ships between human perception and virtual dynam-ics. This paper suggests that it is necessary to clarify the relationships to provide more realistic force/tactile sensation for users. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the force sensations displayed by haptic interfaces. This study focused on two haptic illusion phenomena, which are a haptic horizontal-vertical illusion and a size-weight illusion. Results of experiments using the haptic inter-face verified that such haptic illusions are reproducible in virtual reality. This implies that perceptual exper-iments can be realized using haptic interfaces, which may have potential to discover new haptic illusions. Further, this paper attempts to study the size-weight illusion by using functions of the haptic interface such as position and force sensing functions and propose a new hypothesis on the size-weight illusion. These re-sults demonstrate that the effectiveness of haptic in-terfaces for perceptual experiments