Electrotactile Feedback For Enhancing Contact Information in Virtual Reality
This addresses the need for efficient contact feedback in virtual reality to reduce visual clutter and focus, though it is incremental as it builds on existing feedback methods.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing contact information in virtual reality mid-air interactions by developing a wearable electrotactile feedback system that modulates stimulus intensity based on interpenetration distance. In a user study with 21 participants, it showed that electrotactile feedback significantly improved contact precision and accuracy, with no significant differences compared to visual feedback when optimized.
This paper presents a wearable electrotactile feedback system to enhance contact information for mid-air interactions with virtual objects. In particular, we propose the use of electrotactile feedback to render the interpenetration distance between the user's finger and the virtual content is touched. Our approach consists of modulating the perceived intensity (frequency and pulse width modulation) of the electrotactile stimuli according to the registered interpenetration distance. In a user study (N=21), we assessed the performance of four different interpenetration feedback approaches: electrotactile-only, visual-only, electrotactile and visual, and no interpenetration feedback. First, the results showed that contact precision and accuracy were significantly improved when using interpenetration feedback. Second, and more interestingly, there were no significant differences between visual and electrotactile feedback when the calibration was optimized and the user was familiarized with electrotactile feedback. Taken together, these results suggest that electrotactile feedback could be an efficient replacement of visual feedback for enhancing contact information in virtual reality avoiding the need of active visual focus and the rendering of additional visual artefacts.