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High-spatial-resolution wearable tactile arrays have drawn interest from both industry and research, thanks to their capacity for delivering detailed tactile sensations. However, investigations of human tactile perception with high resolution tactile displays remain limited, primarily due to the high costs of multi-channel control systems and the complex fabrication required for fingertip-sized actuators. In this work, we introduce the Soft Haptic Display (SHD) toolkit, designed to enable students and researchers from diverse technical backgrounds to explore high-density tactile feedback in extended reality (XR), robotic teleoperation, braille displays, navigation aid, MR-compatible somatosensory stimulation, and remote palpation. The toolkit provides a rapid prototyping approach and real-time wireless control for a low-cost, 4×4 soft wearable fingertip tactile display with a spatial resolution of 4 mm. We characterized the display’s performance with a maximum vertical displacement of 1.8 mm, a rise time of 0.25 second, and a maximum refresh rate of 8 Hz. All materials and code are open-sourced to foster broader human tactile perception research of high-resolution haptic displays. 

Active, exploratory touch supports human perception of a broad set of invisible physical surface properties. When traditionally hands-on tasks, such as medical palpation of soft tissue, are translated to virtual settings, haptic perception is throttled by technological limitations, and much of the richness of active exploration can be lost. The current research seeks to restore some of this richness with advanced methods of passively conveying haptic data alongside synchronized visual feeds. A robotic platform presented haptic stimulation modeled after the relative motion between a hypothetical physician's hands and artificial tissue samples during palpation. Performance in discriminating the sizes of hidden “tumors” in these samples was compared across display conditions which included haptic feedback and either: 1) synchronized video of the participant's hand, recorded during active exploration; 2) synchronized video of another person's hand; 3) no accompanying video. The addition of visual feedback did not improve task performance, which was similar whether receiving relative motion recorded from one's own hand or someone else's. While future research should explore additional strategies to improve task performance, this initial attempt to translate active haptic sensations to passive presentations indicates that visuo-haptic feedback can induce reliable haptic perceptions of motion in a stationary passive hand.