A Pneumatic-Actuated Feel-Through Wearable Haptic Display for Multi-Cue Delivery

Compared to the “Seeing-through” paradigm for the concurrent display of both real and virtual images in vision-enabled Augmented Reality (AR), its haptic counterpart, i.e., the “Feeling-through” via wearable tactile systems, which enables to experience simultaneously physical objects and haptically rendered virtual properties, is still largely unexplored. In a previous work, we introduced the Wearable-Fabric Yielding Display (W-FYD), which uses an elastic thin fabric as the interaction surface with the finger, allowing the delivery of softness-related cues both in active and passive exploration mode, together with sliding stimuli. The device was proven effective, but the current design faces form factor issues related to the dimensions and weight of the device, due to the actuation strategy of the lifting mechanism in the passive mode. To tackle this issue, we propose a miniaturized version of the system, named the W-FYD AIR, which allows reducing the overall dimensions of the device, from 100 × 60 × 36 mm to 78 × 45 × 37 mm, and its weight, from 100 g to 54 g, by exploiting pneumatically-actuated chambers for the lifting mechanism. Through careful sizing of each component and a process of characterization and identification, we demonstrated that the new system attained the same characteristics and functionality as the original one.