FiDTouch: A 3D Wearable Haptic Display for the Finger Pad

--The applications of fingertip haptic devices have spread to various fields from revolutionizing virtual reality and medical training simulations to facilitating remote robotic operations, proposing great potential for enhancing user experiences, improving training outcomes, and new forms of interaction. In this work, we present FiDT ouch, a 3D wearable haptic device that delivers cutaneous stimuli to the finger pad, such as contact, pressure, encounter, skin stretch, and vibrotactile feedback. The application of a tiny inverted Delta robot in the mechanism design allows providing accurate contact and fast changing dynamic stimuli to the finger pad surface. The performance of the developed display was evaluated in a two-stage user study of the perception of static spatial contact stimuli and skin stretch stimuli generated on the finger pad. The proposed display, by providing users with precise touch and force stimuli, can enhance user immersion and efficiency in the fields of human-computer and human-robot interactions. Fingertip haptic devices (FHD) enrich the user experience in the realm of human-computer and human-robot interaction, bridging the gap between the digital and physical worlds by providing various cutaneous and force feedback directly to the user's fingertips. The ability to accurately reproduce the feeling of grasping in a virtual or remote environment is essential for creating a realistic experience in Virtual Reality, teleoperation, and telexistence, since finger pads are used for interactions with physical objects and probing the environment in most cases.