While tremendous advances in visual and auditory realism have been made for virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), introducing a plausible sense of physicality into the virtual world remains challenging. Closing the gap between real-world physicality and immersive virtual experience requires a closed interaction loop: applying user-exerted physical forces to the virtual environment and generating haptic sensations back to the users. However, existing VR/AR solutions either completely ignore the force inputs from the users or rely on obtrusive sensing devices that compromise user experience. By identifying users' muscle activation patterns while engaging in VR/AR, we design a learning-based neural interface for natural and intuitive force inputs. Specifically, we show that lightweight electromyography sensors, resting non-invasively on users' forearm skin, inform and establish a robust understanding of their complex hand activities. Fuelled by a neural-network-based model, our interface can decode finger-wise forces in real-time with 3.3% mean error, and generalize to new users with little calibration. Through an interactive psychophysical study, we show that human perception of virtual objects' physical properties, such as stiffness, can be significantly enhanced by our interface. We further demonstrate that our interface enables ubiquitous control via finger tapping. Ultimately, we envision our findings to push forward research towards more realistic physicality in future VR/AR.
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Give Me a Hand: Exploring Bidirectional Mutual Embodied Tangible Interaction in Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) systems have been increasingly used in recent years in various domains, such as education and training. Presence, which can be described as ‘the sense of being there’ is one of the most important user experience aspects in VR. There are several components, which may affect the level of presence, such as interaction, visual fidelity, and auditory cues. In recent years, a significant effort has been put into increasing the sense of presence in VR. This study focuses on improving user experience in VR by increasing presence through increased interaction fidelity and enhanced illusions. Interaction in real life includes mutual and bidirectional encounters between two or more individuals through shared tangible objects. However, the majority of VR interaction to date has been unidirectional. This research aims to bridge this gap by enabling bidirectional mutual tangible embodied interactions between human users and virtual characters in world-fixed VR through real-virtual shared objects that extend from virtual world into the real world. I hypothesize that the proposed novel interaction will shrink the boundary between the real and virtual worlds (through virtual characters that affect the physical world), increase the seamlessness of the VR system (enhance the illusion) and the fidelity of interaction, and increase the level of presence and social presence, enjoyment and engagement. This paper includes the motivation, design and development details of the proposed novel world-fixed VR system along with future directions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1850245
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10219166
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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