2018CHI Haptic Revolver: Touch, Shear, Texture, and Shape Rendering on a Reconfgurable Virtual Real

Whitmire E, Benko H, Holz C, et al. Haptic revolver: Touch, shear, texture, and shape rendering on a reconfigurable virtual reality controller[C]//Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2018: 86.

Abstract

We present Haptic Revolver, a handheld virtual reality controller that renders fngertip haptics when interacting with virtual surfaces. Haptic Revolver’s core haptic element is an actuated wheel that raises and lowers underneath the fnger to render contact with a virtual surface. As the user’s fnger moves along the surface of an object, the controller spins the wheel to render shear forces and motion under the fngertip. The wheel is interchangeable and can contain physical textures, shapes, edges, or active elements to provide different sensations to the user.  Because the controller is spatially tracked, these physical features can be spatially registered with the geometry of the virtual environment and rendered on-demand. We evaluated Haptic Revolver in two studies to understand how wheel speed and direction impact perceived realism. We also report qualitative feedback from users who explored three application scenarios with our controller.

contributions

Specifcally, our contributions include: 
1.The design of Haptic Revolver, a handheld VR controller
that renders touch contact, pressure, shear forces, textures,
and shapes using a rotating wheel beneath the index fnger;
2.Interchangeable haptic wheels that can be used to render
surface features and techniques to haptically render any
scene using an arbitrary wheel;
3.The results of two perceptual user studies that inform the
design of our haptic rendering strategies.

 

Conclusion

Haptic Revolver is a general-purpose handheld VR controller that goes beyond vibrotactile stimulation to render touch contact with virtual surfaces, motion along a surface, textures, and shapes using interchangeable haptic wheels. By customizing wheels for the virtual environment, designers can use Haptic Revolver to render realistic haptic feedback on the fngertip. We demonstrated techniques to render motion along a surface in two dimensions and adapt a particular wheel for use in arbitrary scenes. We conducted two user studies to inform and validate the design of our haptic rendering techniques and a third study to elicit qualitative feedback from participants. We believe that Haptic Revolver offers high-fdelity haptic rendering with clear advantages over vibrotactile solutions and we hope others will build upon our design to continue enabling better haptic experiences for VR.