Let’s Get in Touch! Adding Haptics to Social VR

PubDate: June 2020

Teams: TNO

Writers: Leonor Fermoselle；Simon Gunkel；Frank ter ter Haar；Sylvie Dijkstra-Soudarissanane；Alexander Toet；Omar Niamut；Nanda van van der Stap

PDF: Let’s Get in Touch! Adding Haptics to Social VR

Abstract

Social VR shall allow natural communication between users with high social presence, as if users are in the same room. One way to increase social presence is to add haptic interaction to allow, for example, users to give each other a ”high-five” or to pass documents among them. In this paper, we present our web-based VR communication framework with an added haptic component to simulate touch. The goal of this framework is to enhance the VR communication experience and the social cues exchange between users in VR. We describe our method for rendering haptic feedback within the web-based framework and evaluate the perceived quality of our system with a user survey (with 119 participants). Our proof-of-concept system was rated positively, with the haptic component offering an enhanced quality of the VR experience for 78% of the participants.