Tactile representations of fabrics are critical in virtual retail and VR fitting applications. A pinching tactile display (PTD) using electrostatic adhesion is a fabric-type display that can flexibly adjust tactile sensations by adjusting voltage and frequency, and is expected to be applied to the remote transmission of fabric tactile sensations. However, no significant differences in tactile sensation other than roughness were observed. Building on established research in cross-modal perception, we investigated whether overlaying visual fabric textures could alter the tactile expressiveness of PTDs. We developed a system that integrated a systematically controlled conductive fabric-based PTD with spatially registered VR fabric simulations. Participants rated four tactile properties (roughness, stiffness, thickness, warmth) while touching the same conductive substrate under different visual texture conditions (denim, gauze, toweling, voile). The results showed that voile texture significantly affected stiffness (p=.00887); toweling texture tended to affect warmth (p=.0658); and denim texture tended to affect roughness (p=.0972). These results suggest that virtual texture overlay can affect the warmth, stiffness, and roughness of the PTD. Since the PTD can only change roughness, these results suggest that texture overlay enables the display of tactile sensations that the PTD alone cannot express. On the other hand, no significant influence of texture on thickness was observed. This suggests the pinching motion provided a highly reliable tactile cue, which may have led to visual information being underrated and thus not reaching a significant level. These findings offer strategic insights for employing visual textures to enhance perceived fabric properties, paving the way for deployment in virtual fashion retail and VR fitting applications.

Reference

• Takekazu Kitagishi, Chun-Wei Ooi, Yuichi Hiroi, and Jun Rekimoto. 2025. Pinching Visuo-haptic Display: Investigating Cross-Modal Effects of Visual Textures on Electrostatic Cloth Tactile Sensations . In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI ’25), October 13–17, 2025, Canberra, ACT, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3716553.3750810
• Takekazu Kitagishi, Chun-Wei Ooi, and Jun Rekimoto. 2025. Demonstrating Pinching Visuo-haptic Display: A Dynamic Cloth Texturization Via Visually Enhanced Tactile Sensation . In Proceedings of Computer Human Interaction CHI ’25, March 16–20, 2025, Japan, Yokohama T. Kitagishi, C. Ooi, and J. Rekimoto (CHI ’25). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages
• T. Kitagishi, C. -W. Ooi and Y. Itoh, “Pinching Visuo-Haptic Tactile Display: A Dynamic Cloth Texturization Via Visually Enhanced Tactile Sensation,” 2025 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), Saint Malo, France, 2025, pp. 864-866, doi: 10.1109/VRW66409.2025.00176.