Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR), often summarized as Extended Reality (XR), is moving from a niche product to a mainstream market. Thanks to recent advances in wearable sensing and display technologies, powerful VR and AR headsets are commercially available, even for the general public, and promise to become even more miniaturized and cheaper in the coming years. A myriad of important application cases, ranging from gaming, video-conferencing or shopping to immersive design and engineering or to tele-surgery and virtual training, demonstrate the large innovation potential of XR. However, today’s technologies and applications for XR predominantly focus on the visual channel alone. The visual appearance of virtual elements can be rendered at a stunning fidelity, and real-world objects can be visually augmented in powerful and very realistic ways. In contrast, rendering the haptic feel of objects in XR is still mostly unaddressed, although it is common knowledge that haptic perception is an essential part of how humans experience the world, hence important for realism and immersion.
Some first commercial solutions include haptic actuators in handheld VR controllers or wearable VR gloves. However, the rigid mechanical actuators with rather large form factors come with challenges regarding (1) deployment of rigid technolgoies in the curved and soft human body, (2) inhibiting the natural tactile sensing of the skin, (3) limited spatial resolution, (4) power consumption, and (5) customization for individuals. Adding computer-generated, real-time haptic feedback to objects and surfaces through an ergonomic wearable device is an important gap that needs to be addressed to move Extended Reality to a new level of immersion.
This project set out to mature the crucial components needed for tactile feedback in Augmented and Virtual Reality that can dynamically augment and alter the haptic feel of real-world objects, surfaces, and the human body. We contribute a micron-thin wearable interface that can be ergonomically worn on diverse (curved, soft) body sites, for which it can be easily customized in size and shape. It allows the user to naturally feel physical objects or surfaces across the interface while at the same time delivering computer-generated tactile output at a high resolution, with high resolution and low power consumption. The technical feasibility and user experience of the technology has already been demonstrated and quantified in the PI’s ERC grant InteractiveSkin. The crucial activity around which FEEL-XR revolves is exploring and validating innovative application cases. This requires two essential technical activities to be performed: (1) development and validation of a refined prototype with integrated sensing/action loop and (2) fine-tuning of closed-loop haptic stimulation parameters.
