DragTapVib: An On-Skin Electromagnetic Drag, Tap, and Vibration Actuator for Wearable Computing

The skin, as the largest organ distributed all over the human body, offers excellent opportunities for different kinds of input stimuli. However, most of the haptic devices can only render single sensations or they need to combine multiple complex components for generating multiple sensations. We present “DragTapVib” in this paper, a novel, ultra-low-cost, wearable actuator that can reliably provide dragging, tapping, and vibrating sensations to the user. Our actuator is fully electromagnetically-actuated with a moving tactor that can render three haptic feedbacks through systematically controlling the current inside the flexible PCBs. The actuator can be arranged with varying parts of the body which enriches the potentials to implement promising application scenarios including delivering the notification and providing immersive haptic feedback either in virtual reality or in gameplay. A prototypical technical evaluation demonstrated the mechanical properties of our actuator. We quantitatively conducted a series of psychophysical user studies (N= 12) to reveal the feasibility of our prototype. The overall absolute identification study for distinguishing three sensations accuracy at two body locations reached up to 97.2%.