Encountered-Type Haptic Display via Tracking Calibrated Robot

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Tracking Calibrated Robot (TCR), a versatile haptic device that enables realistic touch feedback in VR without pre-deployment efforts, by dynamically controlling a robot to simulate contact with virtual objects.

Contribution

The paper presents TCR, a novel approach that allows real-time, calibration-free haptic feedback in VR using a collaborative robot, enhancing accessibility and ease of deployment.

Findings

TCR effectively conveys shape information in VR.

Users can discriminate virtual object shapes using TCR.

TCR requires no prior deployment efforts.

Abstract

In the past decades, a variety of haptic devices have been developed to facilitate high-fidelity human-computer interaction (HCI) in virtual reality (VR). In particular, passive haptic feedback can create a compelling sensation based on real objects spatially overlapping with their virtual counterparts. However, these approaches require pre-deployment efforts, hindering their democratizing use in practice. We propose the Tracking Calibrated Robot (TCR), a novel and general haptic approach to free developers from deployment efforts, which can be potentially deployed in any scenario. Specifically, we augment the VR with a collaborative robot that renders haptic contact in the real world while the user touches a virtual object in the virtual world. The distance between the user's finger and the robot end-effector is controlled over time. The distance starts to smoothly reduce to zero when the user intends to touch the virtual object. A mock user study tested users' perception of three virtual objects, and the result shows that TCR is effective in terms of conveying discriminative shape information.