HapticBots: Distributed Encountered-type Haptics for VR with Multiple Shape-changing Mobile Robots
This addresses the challenge of enhancing VR immersion with tangible haptics for users in applications like collaboration and gaming, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of providing realistic haptic feedback in VR by introducing HapticBots, a system using multiple shape-changing mobile robots that move on a tabletop to render surfaces and objects, resulting in advantages in deployability, scalability, and support for multiple touch points.
HapticBots introduces a novel encountered-type haptic approach for Virtual Reality (VR) based on multiple tabletop-size shape-changing robots. These robots move on a tabletop and change their height and orientation to haptically render various surfaces and objects on-demand. Compared to previous encountered-type haptic approaches like shape displays or robotic arms, our proposed approach has an advantage in deployability, scalability, and generalizability -- these robots can be easily deployed due to their compact form factor. They can support multiple concurrent touch points in a large area thanks to the distributed nature of the robots. We propose and evaluate a novel set of interactions enabled by these robots which include: 1) rendering haptics for VR objects by providing just-in-time touch-points on the user's hand, 2) simulating continuous surfaces with the concurrent height and position change, and 3) enabling the user to pick up and move VR objects through graspable proxy objects. Finally, we demonstrate HapticBots with various applications, including remote collaboration, education and training, design and 3D modeling, and gaming and entertainment.