Tactile Displays with Parallel Mechanism

This chapter deals with tactile displays and their mechanisms. We briefly reviewed research history of mechanical type tactile displays and their parallel arrangement. And this chapter mainly describes two systems including tactile displays. The 5x6 pin arrayed tactile display with parallel arrangement of piezoelectric bimorphs has been described in the section 3. The tactile display has been embedded into a mouse device and the performance of the device has been verified from pattern display experiment. Another focus of this chapter is describing a compact tactile display module and verifying its performance in a pen-like form factor. As described in section 4, a small, safe, low power consuming, silent and light tactile display module with parallel and woven arrangement of ultrasonic linear motors has been built. Using the tactile display, we propose the Ubi-Pen which can provide texture and vibration stimuli. This system shows satisfactory preliminary performance in representing tactile patterns. We also evaluate its capacity to support GUI operations by providing scratching sensation when a user rubs surface displayed on a touch screen. There have been various trials to develop tactile displays for simulating surface gratings, patterns, roughness and etc. However, so far, the best candidate in designing tactile display has been a pin-array. In order to provide enough indenting stimulation in a pin-array, parallel arrangement of linear mechanism has been necessarily required. In the future, invention of new materials will suggest compacter and more effective design. In this chapter, we have focused on two technologies suggesting examples of miniaturized design concepts of tactile displays adopting parallel mechanisms.