A novel interactive mouse system for holistic haptic display in a human-computer interface

The sense of touch provides humans with the ability to determine the shape and surface properties of objects. Although touch is an important part of daily life for object manipulation and exploration tasks, users are, unfortunately, rarely provided with the opportunity to use their sense of touch while interacting with computers. To rectify this, this article presents a novel haptic mouse system that can be used' as a human-computer interface with the capability for holistic haptic feedback, including contact force, surface properties, and thermal feedback. The system is composed of 3 main parts. First, the 5-bar mechanism, which comprises the lowermost part of the mouse's body, has been adapted to realize 2-DOF translational force feedback. This mechanism helps the user to feel the contact force, stiffness, and size of a virtual object while exploring a graphical environment. Second, a small tactile display was developed. It has a planar-distributed pin array, and it can represent microscale shapes with various surfaces, such as gratings, grooves, patterns, shapes of icons, and Braille, thereby providing the user with cutaneous stimuli. Third, because the ability to sense temperature is an important factor in the discrimination of the surface property of an object, thermal feedback is provided to the user. The performance of each part and their combinations has been evaluated, and the system shows a remarkable ability to provide users with tactual information while they simply use the mouse without any additional interfaces.