A Pneumatic Feel-Through Wearable Haptic Device

The "Feeling-through" paradigm, which allows simultaneous interaction with physical objects and haptically rendered virtual properties via wearable tactile systems, remains underexplored compared to vision-enabled Augmented Reality. In [1], we introduced the Wearable-Fabric Yielding Display (W-FYD), which uses an elastic thin fabric as the interaction surface with the finger. It allows the delivery of softness-related cues both in active and passive exploration mode, together with sliding stimuli, without blocking the natural cutaneous perception of the user, in teleoperation and AR tasks. However, its size and weight posed limitations. To address this, we developed a miniaturized version, W-FYD AIR, reducing its dimensions from 100x60x36 mm to 78x45x37 mm, and its weight, from 100g to 54g, exploiting pneumatically actuated chambers while maintaining the same functionality and performance, as the original one.