I'm always touched by your presence, dear : combining mediated social touch with morphologically correct visual feedback

Combining mediated social touch (interpersonal touch over a distance) with visual feedback allows people to both see and feel their interaction partner’s touches. Combining touch with vision is expected to increase the transparency of the interface, as well as the user’s sense of telepresence. We anticipated these positive effects of visual feedback to depend on the morphological congruence of the visuotactile stimulation. In our experiment, we compared two input media (the devices on which the touch acts are performed): a sensor-equipped mannequin, enabling a one-to-one mapping between seen and felt touch, and a touch screen displaying buttons. With morphologically congruent visual feedback participants demonstrated more physiological arousal, reported a higher sense of telepresence, and perceived of the mediated touches as more touch-like. These findings illustrate that morphologically congruent multisensory stimulation is important for transparency and telepresence, and that visual feedback, especially when morphologically correct, can improve mediated social touch.