RoomShift: Room-scale Dynamic Haptics for VR with Furniture-moving Swarm Robots
This addresses the challenge of limited physical interaction in VR for users, offering a novel approach to haptic feedback, though it is incremental in combining existing robotics with VR.
RoomShift tackles the problem of enhancing virtual reality immersion by using a swarm of robots to dynamically move furniture, creating a room-scale haptic environment that matches virtual scenes, enabling users to physically interact with objects like sitting or leaning.
RoomShift is a room-scale dynamic haptic environment for virtual reality, using a small swarm of robots that can move furniture. RoomShift consists of nine shape-changing robots: Roombas with mechanical scissor lifts. These robots drive beneath a piece of furniture to lift, move and place it. By augmenting virtual scenes with physical objects, users can sit on, lean against, place and otherwise interact with furniture with their whole body; just as in the real world. When the virtual scene changes or users navigate within it, the swarm of robots dynamically reconfigures the physical environment to match the virtual content. We describe the hardware and software implementation, applications in virtual tours and architectural design and interaction techniques.