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arXiv · 2309.16768

Encountered-Type Haptic Display via Tracking Calibrated Robot

Chenxi Xiao·Yuan Tian
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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.

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Chenxi Xiao, Yuan Tian. 2023-09-28. Encountered-Type Haptic Display via Tracking Calibrated Robot. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16768

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