Rich, informative and realistic haptic feedback is key to enhancing Virtual Reality (VR) manipulation. Tangible objects provide convincing grasping and manipulation interactions with haptic feedback of e.g., shape, mass and texture properties. But these properties are static, and cannot respond to interactions in the virtual environment. On the other hand, vibrotactile feedback provides the opportunity for delivering dynamic cues rendering many different contact properties, such as impacts, object vibrations or textures. Handheld objects or controllers in VR are usually restricted to vibrating in a monolithic fashion. In this paper, we investigate how spatialiazing vibrotactile cues within handheld tangibles could enable a wider range of sensations and interactions. We conduct a set of perception studies, investigating the extent to which spatialization of vibrotactile feedback within tangible objects is possible as well as the benefits of proposed rendering schemes leveraging multiple actuators in VR. Results show that vibrotactile cues from localized actuators can be discriminated and are beneficial for certain rendering schemes.
Informative and realistic haptic feedback significantly enhances virtual reality (VR) manipulation. In particular, vibrotactile feedback (VF) can deliver diverse haptic sensations while remaining relatively simple. This has made it a go-to solution for haptics within hand-held controllers and tangible props for VR. However, VF in hand-helds has solely focused on monolithic vibration of the entire hand-held device. Thus, it is not clear to what extent such hand-held devices could support the delivery of spatialized information within the hand. In this paper, we consider a tangible cylindrical handle that allows interaction with virtual objects extending beyond it. This handle is fitted with a pair of vibrotactile actuators with the objective of providing in-hand spatialized cues indicating direction and distance of impacts. We evaluated its capability for rendering spatialized impacts with external virtual objects. Results show that it performs very well for conveying an impact’s direction and moderately well for conveying an impact’s distance to the user.
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