Enabling wearable soft tactile displays with electroactive smart elastomers

Ongoing developments in our lab to develop wearable soft tactile displays made of electroactive smart elastomers are proposed, which have the benefit that they support multiple-finger interaction with virtual soft bodies, via soft electrically-deformable interfaces. The overall system consists of soft tactile displays arranged at the user’s fingertips, which generate an electrically tuneable force according to information captured by an optical three dimensional finger tracking system, combined with a virtual environment that represents the position of the fingers. The tactile displays are based on an original design which uses the electromechanically active polymer transduction technology known as dielectric elastomer actuators. The paper presents our latest demonstrators, which allow users to probe a soft object with one finger, and describes ongoing development towards a multiple-finger system, based on a new compact design of the tactile displays.