Fengyuan Zhu

Zhenyi He, Fengyuan Zhu, Ken Perlin et al.

Virtual Reality (VR) provides immersive experiences in the virtual world, but it may reduce users' awareness of physical surroundings and cause safety concerns and psychological discomfort. Hence, there is a need of an ambient information design to increase users' situational awareness (SA) of physical elements when they are immersed in VR environment. This is challenging, since there is a tradeoff between the awareness in reality and the interference with users' experience in virtuality. In this paper, we design five representations (indexical, symbolic, and iconic with three emotions) based on two dimensions (vividness and emotion) to address the problem. We conduct an empirical study to evaluate participants' SA, perceived breaks in presence (BIPs), and perceived engagement through VR tasks that require movement in space. Results show that designs with higher vividness evoke more SA, designs that are more consistent with the virtual environment can mitigate the BIP issue, and emotion-evoking designs are more engaging.

Zhenyi He, Fengyuan Zhu, Ken Perlin

We present PhyShare, a new haptic user interface based on actuated robots. Virtual reality has recently been gaining wide adoption, and an effective haptic feedback in these scenarios can strongly support user's sensory in bridging virtual and physical world. Since participants do not directly observe these robotic proxies, we investigate the multiple mappings between physical robots and virtual proxies that can utilize the resources needed to provide a well rounded VR experience. PhyShare bots can act either as directly touchable objects or invisible carriers of physical objects, depending on different scenarios. They also support distributed collaboration, allowing remotely located VR collaborators to share the same physical feedback.

Zhenyi He, Fengyuan Zhu, Aaron Gaudette et al.

We propose a new approach for interaction in Virtual Reality (VR) using mobile robots as proxies for haptic feedback. This approach allows VR users to have the experience of sharing and manipulating tangible physical objects with remote collaborators. Because participants do not directly observe the robotic proxies, the mapping between them and the virtual objects is not required to be direct. In this paper, we describe our implementation, various scenarios for interaction, and a preliminary user study.