Self avatar pseudo-haptics in Virtual Reality

-Tue, Sep 12, 2017-

We propose a system that presents a feeling of resistive force by modifying joint angles of user’s avatar, and an approach to reduce a feeling of discomfort evoked by a conflict between visual and proprioceptive sensations. Pseudo-haptic feedback enables us to provide haptic sensations by making discrepancy between the position of user’s body in the real world and avatar which represents a part of user’s body in an immersive virtual environment without using any complicated devices. However, a larger discrepancy between proprioceptive and visual sensations can cause a feeling of discomfort to a user, which leads to reduce the effectiveness of pseudo-haptic feedback. Also, modifying a displacement of a body part cannot maintain a consistency of whole body parts of a user and an avatar under an immersive virtual environment. To avoid these problems, we proposed a pseudo-haptic approach of modifying a joint angle of avatar. Our experiments showed that modifying multiple joint angles of an avatar’s arm can reduce a feeling of discomfort but still presents a certain intensity of resistive force, compared to changing only a single joint angle. In the demonstration we show some applications of our proposed system using pseudo-haptic feedback system in a conventional VR system.

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