Hand Dominance and Congruence for Wrist-worn Haptics using Custom Voice-Coil Actuation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoWrHap, a wrist-worn haptic device with custom voice coil actuation, and investigates how hand dominance and congruence affect user perception and experience in virtual interactions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel wrist-worn haptic device and examines the effects of hand dominance and hand-wrist congruence on haptic perception and user experience through experimental evaluation.

Findings

Participants performed better with non-congruent mapping.

Participants reported better experiences with congruent mapping.

No significant difference in task performance based on hand dominance.

Abstract

During virtual interactions, rendering haptic feedback on a remote location (like the wrist) instead of the fingertips freeing users' hands from mechanical devices. This allows for real interactions while still providing information regarding the mechanical properties of virtual objects. In this paper, we present CoWrHap -- a novel wrist-worn haptic device with custom-made voice coil actuation to render force feedback. Then, we investigate the impact of asking participants to use their dominant or non-dominant hand for virtual interactions and the best mapping between the active hand and the wrist receiving the haptic feedback, which can be defined as hand-wrist congruence through a user experiment based on a stiffness discrimination task. Our results show that participants performed the tasks (i) better with non-congruent mapping but reported better experiences with congruent mapping, and (ii) with no statistical difference in terms of hand dominance but reported better user experience and enjoyment using their dominant hands. This study indicates that participants can perceive mechanical properties via haptic feedback provided through CoWrHap.