Robotic Haptic Proxies for Collaborative Virtual Reality
This addresses the challenge of enhancing haptic feedback in VR for remote collaboration, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing proxy concepts with a new robotic implementation.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling tangible physical object interaction in collaborative Virtual Reality by using mobile robots as haptic proxies, resulting in a system that allows VR users to share and manipulate objects with remote collaborators without requiring direct mapping between robots and virtual objects.
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.