You are playing a video game, and your avatar is creeping into a haunted house at the dead of night. Suddenly, you freeze in your chair. Something is crawling up your back.
Whether this idea appeals or not, researchers at Disney have made such sensations possible by inventing a system that fools players into thinking that objects are moving against their skin.
Their brainchild, known as Tactile Brush, creates the illusion of being touched by anything from falling rain to crawling insects.
One of the illusions the team employs is called apparent tactile motion. If two vibrating objects are placed close together on skin in quick succession, people often experience this as a single vibration moving between the two points of contact. In a related illusion, known as a phantom tactile sensation, a pair of stationary vibrations is sensed as a single stimulus placed in between the two.
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