Let's Measure Tactile Acuity

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About #

“Let’s Measure Tactile Acuity” is a workshop about “tactile acuity” (the smallest distance between two points that can be felt as two points). The workshop utilizes the “Face Homunculus Viewer (FHV),” a software program that transforms a photograph of one’s face based on the tactile acuity of your forehead and lips. Working in pairs, participants measure the tactile acuity of their forehead and lips by adjusting the distance between the two points of the calipers. When the measured values are input into the FHV, the facial images of the participants are transformed according to the values. By displaying the areas with higher tactile acuity in a larger size, we visualize that the size of the physical skin is different from the size of the skin that our mind perceives and the size of the part of the brain that corresponds to that sensory processing.

Publications #

• (Ja) Sachiyo Ueda, Shigeo Yoshida, Junji Watanabe, Masami Ikeda, Takuro Kayahara, and Michiteru Kitazaki. 2019. Face Homunculus Viewer for Understanding Body Representation in the Primary Somatosensory Cortex. Transactions of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan, Vol.24 No.1 pp.3-12. https://doi.org/10.18974/tvrsj.24.1_3

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