I’m Mikiko Karasawa from the University of Electro-Communications in Japan.
In this presentation, I would like to explain
about the presentation of a feeling of presence using an electrostatic field.
With the spread of COVID-19 infection,
people all over the world are still
communicating with distant people using audio and video.
We would like to support this kind of telecommunication
with tactile presentation technology.
We have focused on what is lacking in current telecommunication:
the presentation of the atmosphere of communication
and especially the "presence" of the communication partners.
Several systems have been proposed to convey the atmosphere
and presence of distant people,
but these systems require the user to gaze at or concentrate on the system.
Therefore, we developed the system which aims to enable users
to feel the "presence-like" sensation “just by being close to the system”,
that is, in more passive way.
This is the system to present a feeling of presence using an electrostatic field.
The proposed system uses toy electrostatic generators
as small Van de Graaff generators.
By driving the motors inside them, the systems are electrified,
which provide fluffiness to the user near the system.
This provides the user with a “presence-like” sensation.
Placing multiple toys in an array like this picture enables
a wide range of presentation and a spatiotemporal division presentation.
Now, let me talk about the experiments.
The 14 participants were asked to place their arm in front of the system
to see how close they could feel fluffiness from the system.
The results indicate that 80% of the participants could feel fluffiness
when the distance was more than 10 cm.
In contrast, there were some participants who did not feel the sensation
even at a short distance.
Interviews after the experiment revealed that they were
those who shaved their arms on the day or the night before,
and those who had hair removal.
We also asked 11 participants to answer whether the sensation was consistent
with a presence-like sensation when they felt fluffiness.
As a result, the participants tended to feel "presence-like" sensation
when they were closer to the system and when they felt a strong fluffiness.
In contrast, opinions were divided on the presentation at 15cm.
Some participants answered that the weaker sensation was more like a presence.
We assume that this is because the concept of "presence" is ambiguous.
We also interviewed the participants about the sensations other than fluffiness.
The most common responses were that they felt a soft flow.
From this results, we are interested in the feeling of a soft flow
that can be obtained from the system.
Therefore, in future work, in addition to investigating
the presentation of presence-like sensation,
we would like to verify the effect of moving electrostatic patterns
to present a softly flowing sensation.
Thank you for watching.