ThermoTouch

ThermoTouch is a new type of thermo-haptic display device. It provides a visual display with a grid of thermal pixels that can provide hot or cold haptic feedback. Unlike previous devices, our proposed design uses liquid cooling and resistive heating to output thermal feedback. We describe the hardware and software design of ThermoTouch. Technical measurements on our prototype indicate that ThermoTouch has thermal output properties comparable to Peltier elements, which have been used extensively as thermal transducers in previous works. Our measurements of ThermoTouch's per-area power consumption and its low hardware cost per thermal pixel indicate that our technology improves scalability to large-scale thermal displays over technologies used in previous systems. As an example application of ThermoTouch, we describe an editing, automatic keyframe generation and playback system for video with an additional thermo-haptic feedback channel. Lastly, we describe technical design considerations for creating large-scale thermal displays using ThermoTouch technology.