Recent advances in multi-mode haptic feedback technologies towards wearable interfaces

The rapid development of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) highlights the demands of haptic feedback technologies, especially with portable or even wearable formats as which enable significantly enhancing users’ immersive experiences in various fields, from social media, to gaming, to biomedical instrumentations, to robotics and many others. Haptic feedback technologies involve the use of advanced actuators to stimulate mechanoreceptors or afferent nerves under the skin to create sensation. Recent advances in haptic feedback interfaces based on different working mechanisms show that individual haptic working mode suffers from different shortcomings. While the combination of multi-mode feedback technologies together could significantly contribute to address the needs and challenges for the current and future haptic interfaces. Thus, this article intends to review the current status and opportunities of different haptic feedback technologies, where it first overviews the current haptic feedback interfaces that are divided into three specific methods of force based haptic interfaces, thermal based haptic feedback interfaces and nerve stimulation haptic feedback interfaces. In the second part, we compare the difference of the three types of haptic feedback technologies and then discuss and highlight the current multi-mode haptic interfaces from them. In the end, we outlook the perspective of future development of the three haptic feedback interfaces.