TouchVR: a Wearable Haptic Interface for VR Aimed at Delivering Multi-modal Stimuli at the User's Palm
This addresses the need for more immersive and interactive VR experiences for users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing haptic and VR technologies.
The researchers tackled the problem of limited tactile feedback in VR by developing TouchVR, a wearable haptic interface that delivers multimodal stimuli to the palm and fingertips, resulting in applications like MatrixTouch and BallFeel to demonstrate its capabilities.
TouchVR is a novel wearable haptic interface which can deliver multimodal tactile stimuli on the palm by DeltaTouch haptic display and vibrotactile feedback on the fingertips by vibration motors for the Virtual Reality (VR) user. DeltaTouch display is capable of generating 3D force vector at the contact point and presenting multimodal tactile sensation of weight, slippage, encounter, softness, and texture. The VR system consists of HTC Vive Pro base stations and head-mounted display (HMD), and Leap Motion controller for tracking the user's hands motion in VR. The MatrixTouch, BallFeel, and RoboX applications have been developed to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed technology. A novel haptic interface can potentially bring a new level of immersion of the user in VR and make it more interactive and tangible.