Abstract
As virtual reality technologies are advanced rapidly, how to render 3D objects across modalities is becoming an important issue. This study is therefore aimed to investigate human discriminability on the curvature of 3D polygonal surfaces with focusing on the vision and touch senses because they are most dominant when explore 3D shapes. For the study, we designed a psychophysical experiment using signal detection theory to determine curvature discrimination for three conditions: haptic only, visual only, and both haptic and visual. The results show that there is no statistically significant difference among the conditions although the threshold in the haptic condition is the lowest. The results also indicate that rendering using both visual and haptic channels could degrade the performance of discrimination on a 3D global shape. These results must be considered when a multimodal rendering system is designed in near future.