The Virtual Rainstick Kit from Tactile Labs provide you the necessary standalone hardware to sense, process and output vibrotactile signals.  This kit can reproduce the "Virtual Rolling Stone" (some refers it to the virtual rainstick) experiment described in this article, and possibly much more.

The Virtual Rainstick kit mainly consists of two parts: 1) the sensing and actuating handle and 2) the amplification unit. The handle contains a high-bandwidth accelerometer and gyroscope, capable of sensing the tilt and the vibration applied to the handle, as well as one 14mm Haptuator (original) for precision vibration output. The amplification unit consists of an Arduino-like, easy to program processor, as well as a 2-channel audio amplifier, allowing the user to process and amplify the vibrotactile signal.

Download the Handle TL003-SEN-A Product Specification

Download the Amplifier Unit TL003-AMP-A Product Specification

Download the Rainstick TL003-RAIN_KIT Application Note

Selected Publications

H. Yao and V. Hayward. An experiment on length perception with a virtual rolling stone. In Proceedings of EuroHaptics 2006, pages 325–330, 2006. (Best Hands-on Demo Award)