Visual-haptic perception of compliance:: Fusion of visual and haptic information

Visual-haptic compliance perception demands processing of haptic position and force information as well as visual position information. In this study it was analyzed how different compliances are perceived and how single modality estimates are combined to a visual-haptic percept of compliance. Participants estimated the compliance of a virtual cube displayed by a human system interface. Thereby, psychometric functions were recorded and statistically evaluated. Results indicated that human's ability to discriminate differences relative to a standard compliance decreased as the standard compliance increased. Furthermore, in the conflicting case participants' bimodal percept was close to the modality that captured the less compliant information.