What we feel from handling liquids in vessels produces unmistakably fluid tactile sensations. These stimulate essential perceptions in home, laboratory, or industrial contexts. Feeling fluid interactions from virtual fluids would similarly enrich experiences in virtual reality. We introduce Geppetteau, a novel string-driven weight shifting mechanism capable of providing perceivable tactile sensations of handling virtual liquids within a variety of vessel shapes. These mechanisms widen the range of augmentable shapes beyond the state-of-the-art of existing mechanical systems. In this work, Geppetteau is integrated into conical, spherical, cylindrical, and cuboid shaped vessels. Variations of these shapes are often used for fluid containers in our day-to-day. We studied the effectiveness of Geppetteau in simulating fine and coarse-grained tactile sensations of virtual liquids across three user studies. Participants found Geppetteau successful in providing congruent physical sensations of handling virtual liquids in a variety of physical vessel shapes and virtual liquid volumes and viscosities.
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SWISH: A Shifting-Weight Interface of Simulated Hydrodynamics for Haptic Perception of Virtual Fluid Vessels
Current VR/AR systems are unable to reproduce the physical sensation of fluid vessels, due to the shifting nature of fluid motion. To this end, we introduce SWISH, an ungrounded mixed-reality interface, capable of affording the users a realistic haptic sensation of fluid behaviors in vessels. The chief mechanism behind SWISH is in the use of virtual reality tracking and motor actuation to actively relocate the center of gravity of a handheld vessel, emulating the moving center of gravity of a handheld vessel that contains fluid. In addition to solving challenges related to reliable and efficient motor actuation, our SWISH designs place an emphasis on reproducibility, scalability, and availability to the maker culture. Our virtual-to-physical coupling uses Nvidia Flex's Unity integration for virtual fluid dynamics with a 3D printed augmented vessel containing a motorized mechanical actuation system. To evaluate the effectiveness and perceptual efficacy of SWISH, we conduct a user study with 24 participants, 7 vessel actions, and 2 virtual fluid viscosities in a virtual reality environment. In all cases, the users on average reported that the SWISH bucket generates accurate tactile sensations for the fluid behavior. This opens the potential for multi-modal interactions with programmable fluids in virtual environments for chemistry education, worker training, and immersive entertainment.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1917912
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10179716
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- UIST '19: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 751 to 761
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3332165.3347870
