| A key challenge facing 3D interface designers, and operators who teleoperate remote environments is to develop effective techniques to depict objects in 3D space on a 2-dimensional physical medium; a flat computer screen. Spatial relationships among objects, their sizes and locations are of high importance for users in order to be able to locate and manipulate these objects. In particular, depth perception (z dimension) is a main challenge for researchers who have designed many depth cues in order to overcome it. The main trend of providing depth perception is stereoscopy; other approaches utilize shading and shadow, motion, reference frames, size, perspective and others. These visual cues, including stereoscopy, have certain limitations. In this work, we propose to exploit human sensory modality for perceiving depth in teleoperated 3D environments where complex visual information - which may distract the operator - is presented. We exploit the funneling illusion phenomenon to provide a high resolution tactile depth display on the forearm. It utilizes stimulus location perception rather than stimulus intensity perception. One psychophysical experiment is conducted to study the resolution of the funneling illusion method on the forearm, and another experiment to evaluate its performance in a Telepresence and teleaction (TPTA) system scenario where a fragile dangerous object is being manipulated. Experiments show that our approach can replace the visual feedback methods and outperforms the stimulus intensity perception method. |
