Textured Phantom Sensations: Rendering Spatial Textured Signals between Fingertips Using Vibrotactile Phantom Illusion

Abstract

Phantom sensation (PS), an illusory sensation occurring between multiple stimulated sites, has been used to deliver spatial information with simple sinusoidal vibration signals, offering limited expressivity for haptic design. To address this limitation, we assessed the robustness of PS to complex waveforms of texture vibrations delivered to the index and middle fingertips, which we refer to as textured PS (TPS) for brevity. In Study 1, we investigated spatially static and dynamic PS with temporally stationary texture vibrations from three textures. Study 2 examined both spatially static and dynamic PS for five temporally nonstationary texture vibrations generated from two scratching motions. Average texture recognition accuracies for temporally stationary vibrations were 57.6% and 59.7%, while those of temporally nonstationary vibrations were 67.5% and 72.4% for spatially static and dynamic TPS, respectively. Our work extends PS to deliver spatial information with complex vibration waveforms while maintaining comparable performance to simple sinusoidal PS. We discuss the implications of our work for designing expressive phantom vibrations in user applications. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.