Exploring Perceptual Effects of Phase Spectra in Vibrotactile Rendering

Tactile information is known to be used and integrated into various fields, such as robotics, virtual reality, and healthcare, to improve immersion, telepresence, perfor- mance, and substitute for different sensations. Vibrotactile stimulation is a widely used haptic modality, owing to its ease of modification and integration into existing interfaces. Many studies have focused on the characteristics of the magnitude spectrum in the frequency domain. We focus on the phase spectrum as a novel parameter to modify for a wider variety of rendered vibrotactile stimuli. In this study, we evaluated the effect of the phase spectrum on the tactile perception by generating Noise-Texture chimeras, which consists of the magnitude spectrum of colored noise and the phase spectrum of measured skin vibration for tracing certain textures. The results demonstrated that the phase spectrum is crucial to the tactile perception as well as the magnitude spectrum, indicating the possibility of rendering various vibrotactile textures with the usage of the phase spectrum and colored noise.