Comparing Apparent Haptic Motion and Funneling for the Perception of Tactile Animation Illusions On a Circular Tactile Display

Tactile animation illusions are used to display dynamic information with haptic cues. In this study, we investigate two forms of tactile animation illusions that leverage the Funneling effect and Apparent Haptic Motion (AHM) on a one-dimensional circular tactile display. We define new parameters for the description of AHM that describe both the temporal and spatial aspects of these animations: Angle per Actuator (APA) and Revolution Duration (RD). We present three user studies about the perception of angular animations produced with these effects. Our results show that people can interpret AHM animations regardless of the APA value and that they can interpret tactile animation illusions slower than one degree per second. We also showed that the participants' ability to discriminate angular animations improves proportionally with the angle presented.