Multimodal Haptic Display for Virtual Reality: A Survey

Human haptic perception system is complex, involving both cutaneous and kinesthetic receptors. These receptors work together and enable human to perceive the external world. To simulate immersive interaction with virtual objects in virtual reality scenarios haptic devices are desired to reproduce multiproperties of virtual objects, support multigestures of human hands to perform fine manipulation, produce haptic stimuli for simultaneously stimulating multireceptors (including cutaneous and kinesthetic receptors) of human haptic channel, and thus invoke realistic compound haptic sensations. In recent years, such multimodal haptic devices have emerged. In this paper, we survey the latest progress on multimodal haptic devices, identify the gaps, and put forward future research directions on the topic.