First Evaluation of A Novel Tactile Display Exerting Shear Force via Lateral Displacement KNUT DREWING Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics MICHAEL FRITSCHI Technische Universit¨ at M ¨ unchen REGINE ZOPF, and MARC O. ERNST Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and MARTIN BUSS Technische Universit¨ at M ¨ unchen Based on existing knowledge on human tactile movement perception, we constructed a prototype of a novel tactile multipin display that controls lateral pin displacement and, thus produces shear force. Two experiments focus on the question of whether the prototype display generates tactile stimulation that is appropriate for the sensitivity of human tactile perception. In particular, Experiment I studied human resolution for distinguishing between different directions of pin displacement and Experiment II explored the perceptual integration of information resulting from the displacement of multiple pins. Both ex- periments demonstrated that humans can discriminate between directions of the displacements, and also that the technically realized resolution of the display exceeds the perceptual resolution (>14 ◦ ). Experiment II demonstrated that the human brain does not process stimulation from the different pins of the display independent of one another at least concerning direction. The acquired psychophysical knowledge based on this new technology will in return be used to improve the design of the display. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems—Human information processing; H5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—Evaluation/methodology; haptic I/O; theory and methods General Terms: Design, Experimentation, Human Factors Additional Key Words and Phrases: Haptic interfaces, psychophysics, tactile movement perception, shear force, tangential displacement This work is part of the TOUCH-HapSys project financially supported by the 5th Framework IST Program of the European Union, action line IST-2002-6.1.1, contract number IST-2002-38040. For the content of this paper the authors are solely resposible for, it does not necessarily represent the opinion of the European Community. Knut Drewing is now at the Institute of Psychology, Giessen University, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10F, 35393 Gießen, Germany; email: Knut.Drewing@psychol.uni-giessen.de. Authors’ addresses: Knut Drewing, Regine Zopf, and Marc Ernst, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstraße 38, 72076 T ¨ ubingen, Germany; email: {regine.zopf, marc.ernst}@tuebingen.mpg.de; Michael Fritschi and Martin Buss, Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (LSR), Technische Universit¨ at M ¨ unchen, 80290 M ¨ unchen, Germany; email: {michael.fritschi, martin.buss}@ei.tum.de. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax: +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c  2005 ACM 1544-3558/05/0400-0001 $5.00 ACM Transactions on Applied Perceptions, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 2005, Pages 1–14.