Feel It on Your Fingers: Dataglove with Vibrotactile Feedback for Virtual Reality and Telerobotics

摘要

With the rise of Virtual Reality (VR) applications it is interesting to see how immersion can be improved, especially by providing haptic feedback on the user hands, using affordable technologies. Indeed, while several commercial products exist that can be used as input devices (i.e. from the user to the virtual reality), such as data gloves or optical trackers, solutions for effective feedback (i.e. from the virtual reality to the user) arc still lacking, especially at low prices. We describe here the design and realization of an affordable data glove to provide vibrotactile feedback to human users using small vibrating motors, and we report preliminary user studies to prove its effectiveness; interestingly, combined with a commercially available optical tracker (i.e. Leap Motion) to be used as input device, the data glove can be used in a wide range of Virtual Reality and Telerobotics applications. User studies include (i) rendering a feedback to multiple fingers at the same time, and recording how many stimuli the users could correctly differentiate, and (ii) simulating the stiffness of a virtual object, and testing through a Just Noticeable Difference (JND) experiment whether participants could differentiate two objects chosen among 20 pairs of objects with varying stiffness. It was found that participants (i) can easily detect simultaneous feedback on up to two fingers, but struggle to precisely localize feedback on more than three fingers, and they (ii) can differentiate virtual objects of different stiffness by virtually "squeezing" them, up to a certain JND.