Investigating the Effect of Pseudo-Haptics on Perceptions Toward Onomatopoeia Text During Finger-Point Tracing

With the advancement of haptic technology, the use of pseudo-haptics to provide tactile feedback without physical contact has garnered significant attention. This paper aimed to investigate whether sliding fingers over onomatopoetic text strings with pseudo-haptic effects induces change in perception toward their symbolic semantics. To address this, we conducted an experiment using finger-point reading as our subject matter. The experimental results confirmed that the “neba-neba,” “puru-puru,” and “fusa-fusa” effects create a pseudo-haptic feeling for the associated texts on the “hard–soft,” “slippery–sticky,” and “elastic–inelastic” adjective pairs. Specifically, for “hard–soft,” it was found that the proposed effects could consistently produce an impact.