Setup consistent visual textures for haptic surfaces in a virtual reality world

In the real world, interactions with objects are typically multimodal, involving two or more sensory modalities. To simulate the real world in virtual environments, it is thus important to provide multisensory input. Haptics are increasingly being employed as an input channel. However, different modal interfaces are artificially created in a virtual reality world. Does the visual information we provide about surfaces need to be consistent with their haptic representation? In this paper, we present the results of a haptic texture cognition experiment in which subjects judged the haptic size of regular dots. We found that visual texture information that was consistent with haptic information lead to a higher percentage of correct answers and shorter judging times. Furthermore, we found that participants relied on visual information as judgments became more difficult, even though they were asked to make decisions using haptic stimuli only.