Active and Passive Haptic Perception of Shape: Passive Haptics Can Support Navigation

Real-time haptic interactions occur under two exploration modes: active and passive. In this paper, we present a series of experiments that evaluate the main perceptual characteristics of both exploration modes. In particular, we focus on haptic shape recognition as it represents a fundamental task in many applications using haptic environments. The results of four experiments conducted with a group of 10 voluntary subjects show that the differences in motor activity between active and passive haptics ease the perception of surfaces for the first case and the perception of pathways for the latter. In addition, the guidance nature of passive haptics makes the pathway direction easy to recognize. This work shows that this last observation could find application in more challenging tasks such as navigation in space.