CardsVR: A Two-Person VR Experience with Passive Haptic Feedback from a Deck of Playing Cards

TL;DR

CardsVR is a two-person virtual reality system that uses tracked physical playing cards to enhance presence and realism in remote social interactions, demonstrating improved user experience through passive haptic feedback.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel passive haptic feedback method using tracked physical cards in VR, enhancing social presence during remote card games.

Findings

Passive haptic feedback improves perceived realism.

Participants felt more capable of acting in the environment.

Enhanced sense of haptics observed in user study.

Abstract

Presence in virtual reality (VR) is meaningful for remotely connecting with others and facilitating social interactions despite great distance while providing a sense of "being there." This work presents CardsVR, a two-person VR experience that allows remote participants to play a game of cards together. An entire deck of tracked cards are used to recreate the sense of playing cards in-person. Prior work in VR commonly provides passive haptic feedback either through a single object or through static objects in the environment. CardsVR is novel in providing passive haptic feedback through multiple cards that are individually tracked and represented in the virtual environment. Participants interact with the physical cards by picking them up, holding them, playing them, or moving them on the physical table. Our participant study (N=23) shows that passive haptic feedback provides significant improvement in three standard measures of presence: Possibility to Act, Realism, and Haptics.