Investigating Roughness and Hardness Perception through Vibrotactile Augmentation of Tangible Textures

We investigate whether a small set of tangible 3D-printed textures can be augmented with vibrotactile feedback to render a broader set of texture sensations. Our approach combines hair-like printed textures, which modulate perceived hardness, with transverse sinusoidal vibrations, which modulate perceived roughness. We ran two user studies: a haptic-only study and a visuo-haptic study in VR. This paper presents preliminary results showing that vibrotactile augmentation can modulate the perceived roughness of physical textures in haptic-only interaction, and investigates how these effects extend to visuo-haptic interaction in VR, where visuo-haptic matching was impacted by hardness but not roughness.