VibroWeight: Simulating Weight and Center of Gravity Changes of Objects in Virtual Reality for Enhanced Realism
This addresses the issue of reduced immersion in VR for users by providing enhanced haptic feedback, though it is incremental as it builds on existing VR controller technology.
The paper tackled the problem of limited haptic feedback in virtual reality by developing VibroWeight, a low-cost hardware prototype using liquid metal to simulate weight and center of gravity changes, resulting in significantly better realism and comfort for 29 participants.
Haptic feedback in virtual reality (VR) allows users to perceive the physical properties of virtual objects (e.g., their weight and motion patterns). However, the lack of haptic sensations deteriorates users' immersion and overall experience. In this work, we designed and implemented a low-cost hardware prototype with liquid metal, VibroWeight, which can work in complementarity with commercial VR handheld controllers. VibroWeight is characterized by bimodal feedback cues in VR, driven by adaptive absolute mass (weights) and gravity shift. To our knowledge, liquid metal is used in a VR haptic device for the first time. Our 29 participants show that VibroWeight delivers significantly better VR experiences in realism and comfort.