Rubber Hand Illusion Using Invisible Tactile Stimulus

Rubber hand illusion (RHI) is an illusion that a subject perceives a rubber hand as his/her own hand. When a subject is given tactile stimulation on his/her hand without visual cues and fake hands visually stimulated at the same time, the subject feels as if the fake rubber hand is his/her real hand. In this paper, we evaluate RHI caused by invisible tactile stimulus of airborne ultrasound tactile display (AUTD) and effect of existence of a screen. We use a tactile projector system to display both invisible tactile stimulus and a visible projected animation image. Based on our experiment, we show the following two main findings. 1) Invisible tactile feedback of ultrasound can be used to lead RHI provided the stimulus synchronized with a projected visual image. 2) Removal of a screen did not affect to the strength of RHI so much. Our experiment result also shows that removing the screen enhances the sense of two hands ownership than a general situation.