Retargeted Self-Haptics for Increased Immersion in VR without Instrumentation
Today’s consumer virtual reality (VR) systems offer immersive graphics and audio, but haptic feedback is rudimentary – deliv- ered through controllers with vibration feedback or is non-existent (i.e., the hands operating freely in the air). In this paper, we ex- plore an alternative, highly mobile and controller-free approach to haptics, where VR applications utilize the user’s own body to provide physical feedback. To achieve this, we warp (retarget) the locations of a user’s hands such that one hand serves as a physical surface or prop for the other hand. For example, a hand holding a virtual nail can serve as a physical backstop for a hand that is virtually hammering, providing a sense of impact in an air-borne and uninstrumented experience. To illustrate this rich design space, we implemented twelve interactive demos across three haptic cate- gories. We conclude with a user study from which we draw design recommendations.
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Reference
Karan Ahuja, Vivian Shen, Cathy Mengying Fang, Nathan Riopelle, Andy Kong, and Chris Harrison. 2022. ControllerPose: Inside-Out Body Capture with VR Controller Cameras. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 108, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502105