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HapticHead: A Spherical Vibrotactile Grid around the Head for 3D Guidance in Virtual and Augmented Reality

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Current virtual and augmented reality head-mounted displays usually include no or only a single vibration motor for haptic feedback and do not use it for guidance. We present HapticHead, a system utilizing multiple vibrotactile actuators distributed in three concentric ellipses around the head for intuitive haptic guidance through moving tactile cues. We conducted three experiments, which indicate that HapticHead vibrotactile feedback is both faster (2.6 s vs. 6.9 s) and more precise (96.4% vs. 54.2% success rate) than spatial audio (generic head-related transfer function) for finding visible virtual objects in 3D space around the user. The baseline of visual feedback is as expected more precise (99.7% success rate) and faster (1.3 s) in comparison, but there are many applications in which visual feedback is not desirable or available due to lighting conditions, visual overload, or visual impairments. Mean final precision with HapticHead feedback on invisible targets is 2.3° compared to 0.8° with visual feedback. We successfully navigated blindfolded users to real household items at different heights using HapticHead vibrotactile feedback independently of a head-mounted display.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. 3d output
    2. augmented reality
    3. guidance
    4. haptic feedback
    5. navigation
    6. spatial interaction
    7. vibrotactile
    8. virtual reality

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    • (2024)A Wearable Haptic Sleeve Interface for Spaceflight Robotic Arm OperationsCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3681943(318-322)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Demonstrating VibraForge: An Open-source Vibrotactile Prototyping Toolkit with Scalable Modular DesignAdjunct Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3672539.3686764(1-5)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
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