• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.441-452
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• 2012

Recently, various researches have been attempted to effectively display pseudo-aural senses to the hearing-impaired or the deaf, using vibro-tactile stimulus as well as visual sense. Particularly, it is reported that as complementary senses to support the visual sense, tactile senses displayed by either speakers or vibration motors improve the reality sense significantly but do not nearly improve the emotional sense. Thus, in this study, the thermal sense is selected as another complementary sense to support the pseudo-aural sense display and it is investigated whether the thermal sense could generate a pseudo-aural sense or not. For this purpose, a thermal display module which could effectively display the desired thermal sense is implemented. Then, experiments have been conducted to subjects, which provide them with various types of stimuli combined with the aural, the vibrotactile, and the thermal stimuli along with the visual information. It can be confirmed, through statistical analysis on the data collected from experiments, that subjects could feel a pseudo-thermal sense closer to the real thermal sense which the normal subject feel from both the visual and the aural information, particularly either i) with the thermal stimulus along with the visual information or ii) with both the thermal and the vibrotactile stimuli along with the visual information than only with the visual information. Conclusively, it can be confirmed that the thermal stimulus applied to the skin of the subjects could play a role of effectively displaying pseudo-aural sense related to the thermal sense, as an complementary media for the pseudo-aural display.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2011.06a
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• pp.1483-1484
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• 2011

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2012.05a
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• pp.1215-1216
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• 2012

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.638-647
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• 2011

Various approaches directly using vibrations of speakers have been suggested to effectively display the aural information such as the music to the hearing-impaired or the deaf. However, in these approaches, the human can't sense the frequency information over the maximum perceivable vibro-tactile frequency (around 1kHz). Therefore, in this study, an approach via spectral modulation of compressing the high frequency audio information into perceivable vibro-tactile frequency domain and outputting the modulated signals through the designated speakers is proposed. Then it is shown, through simulations of using Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) with Hanning windows and through preliminary experiments of using the vibro-tactile display testbed which is built and interfaced with a notebook PC, that the modulated signal of a natural sound composing sounds of a frog, a bird, and a water stream could produce the noise-free signal suitable enough for vibro-tactile speakers without causing Significant interfering disturbances, Lastly, for three different combinations of information provided to the subject, that is, i) with only video image, ii) with video image along with the modulated vibro-tactile stimuli as proposed in this study to the forearm of the subject, and iii) with video image along with full audio information, the effects to the human sense of reality and his emotion to given audio-video clips including various sounds and images are investigated and compared. It is shown from results of those experiments that the proposed method of providing modulated vibro-tactile stimuli along with the video images to the human has very high feasibility to transmit pseudo-aural sense to the human.