  Handheld kinesthetic haptic interfaces can provide greater mobility and
richer tactile information as compared to traditional grounded devices. In this
paper, we introduce a new handheld haptic interface which takes input using
bidirectional coupled finger flexion. We present the device design motivation
and design details and experimentally evaluate its performance in terms of
transparency and rendering bandwidth using a handheld prototype device. In
addition, we assess the device's functional performance through a user study
comparing the proposed device to a commonly used grounded input device in a set
of targeting and tracking tasks.
