Mediated Social Touching: Haptic Feedback Affects Social Experience of Touch Initiators

Abstract

Mediated social touch enables us to share hugs, handshakes, and caresses at a distance. Past work has focused on the experience of being touched by a remote person, but the touch initiator's experience is underexplored. We ask whether a variation in haptic feedback can influence the touch initiator's social experience of the interaction. In a user study participants stroked a remote person's hand in virtual reality while feeling no haptic feedback, ultrasonic stimulation, or passive feedback from a silicone hand. In each condition, they rated the pleasantness of the interaction, the friendliness of the remote person, and their sense of co-presence. We also captured the velocity of their stroking and asked for reflections on the interaction and mediated social touch as a whole. The results show significant effects of haptic feedback on co-presence, pleasantness, and stroking velocity. The qualitative responses suggest that these results are due to the familiarity of the solid silicone hand, and the participants' assumption that when they felt feedback, the remote person felt similar feedback.

Multisensory experiences of affective touch in virtual reality enhance engagement, body ownership, perceived pleasantness, and arousal modulation

“…This expands on previous literature looking at the physiological effects of painful or affective touch in VR, where no haptic input was provided (Fusaro et al 2016). Our results highlight that affective touch is a multisensory experience where more is more, and con rm that visuo-tactile (compared to visual only) stimulation leads to an overall higher quality of a virtual experience (Apostolou and Liarokapis 2022; Maunsbach et al 2023).…”