Open Tactile - An open, modular hardware system for controlling tactile displays

TL;DR

Open Tactile is an open-source, modular hardware and software system designed to control various tactile displays, demonstrated with a tactile mouse using piezoelectric actuators, aiming to facilitate research and development in tactile interfaces.

Contribution

It introduces an open, extensible hardware and software architecture for tactile displays, simplifying their control and experimentation for non-experts.

Findings

Demonstrated with a tactile mouse using PZT actuators

Provides an easy-to-use software stack for defining tactile scenarios

Released under MIT license to promote accessibility and collaboration

Abstract

Tactile displays have a wide potential field of applications, ranging from enhancing Virtual-Reality scenarios up to aiding telesurgery as well as in fundamental psychological and neurophysiological research. In this paper, we describe an open source hardware and software architecture that is designed to drive a variety of different tactile displays. For demonstration purposes, a tactile computer mouse featuring a simple tactile display, based on lateral piezoelectric (PZT) actuators, is presented. Even though we will focus on driving mechanical actuators in this paper, the system can be extended to different working principles. The suggested architecture is supplied with a custom, easy to use, software stack allowing a simple definition of tactile scenarios as well as user studies while being especially tailored to non-computer scientists. By releasing the OpenTactile system under MIT license we hope to ease the burden of controlling tactile displays as well as designing and reproducing the related experiments.