PhyShare: Sharing Physical Interaction in Virtual Reality
This addresses the challenge of enhancing sensory immersion in VR for users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing robotic haptic interfaces.
The researchers tackled the problem of providing effective haptic feedback in virtual reality by developing PhyShare, a haptic user interface using actuated robots, which supports multiple mappings between physical robots and virtual proxies and enables distributed collaboration for shared physical feedback.
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.