It is widely recognized that haptic display is one of the key elements for making the virtual reality technology more powerful, and various force and/or tactile display devices have been developed. However, many of these devices are always in touch with the fingers or hands of the operator and it is impossible for an operator to feel the difference between contact and non-contact state with a virtual object directly from sensory channel of touch in his/her fingers or hands. This paper presents a new three-dimensional haptic display device we have developed for providing both touch and force feeling to operator's fingers. This is an extension of our previous device for two-dimensional application. The control algorithm for the new device and some experimental results are also presented.

The importance of force and tactile display in virtual reality technology has been recognized recently and numerous researches have been done including development of various force and/or tactile display devices. However, many of them are always in touch with fingers or hands of operators and it is impossible for an operator to feel difference between contact and noncontact state with a virtual object directly from sensory channel of touch in his/her finger or hand. This paper presents a new haptic display device we have developed which provides both touch and force feeling to the operator's fingers. This device tracks the operator's finger with no contact when the finger is not in contact with any virtual object. It touches and displays force to the finger only when some virtual object is in touch with the finger. A control algorithm for the system to display dynamic virtual objects is given. Preliminary experimental results are also presented.