"Can I Touch This?": Survey of Virtual Reality Interactions via Haptic Solutions

TL;DR

This survey reviews current haptic solutions in VR, analyzing their physicality and actuation, and discusses their limitations and potential for future interaction design improvements.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework to compare haptic devices based on physicality and actuation, and offers insights into their evaluation and future development.

Findings

Variety of haptic solutions identified and categorized.

Current evaluation criteria have limitations.

Potential of encounter-type haptic devices discussed.

Abstract

Haptic feedback has become crucial to enhance the user experiences in Virtual Reality (VR). This justifies the sudden burst of novel haptic solutions proposed these past years in the HCI community. This article is a survey of Virtual Reality interactions, relying on haptic devices. We propose two dimensions to describe and compare the current haptic solutions: their degree of physicality, as well as their degree of actuation. We depict a compromise between the user and the designer, highlighting how the range of required or proposed stimulation in VR is opposed to the haptic interfaces flexibility and their deployment in real-life use-cases. This paper (1) outlines the variety of haptic solutions and provides a novel perspective for analysing their associated interactions, (2) highlights the limits of the current evaluation criteria regarding these interactions, and finally (3) reflects the interaction, operation and conception potentials of "encountered-type of haptic devices".