PneumAct: Pneumatic Kinesthetic Actuation of Body Joints in Virtual Reality Environments

Sebastian Günther, Mohit Makhija, Florian Müller, Dominik Schön, Max Mühlhäuser, Markus Funk

DIS 2019

Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference

TL;DR

What we did: We built PneumAct, a pneumatic jacket that enables kinesthetic movements of body joints in Virtual Reality environments by using two types of actuators: Contraction Actuators to flex joints and Extension Actuators to extend them.

What we found: We found that different inflation durations and patterns significantly affect the angle of arm movements, with continuous inflation resulting in more fluid motions while interval patterns are better for precise targeting.

Takeaway: Our PneumAct system enhances immersion and realism in Virtual Reality applications, making it a valuable addition to traditional haptic feedback methods like vibrotactile systems.

Abstract

Virtual Reality Environments (VRE) create an immersive user experience through visual, aural, and haptic sensations. However, the latter is often limited to vibrotactile sensations that are not able to actively provide kinesthetic motion actuation. Further, such sensations do not cover natural representations of physical forces, for example, when lifting a weight. We present PneumAct, a jacket to enable pneumatically actuated kinesthetic movements of arm joints in VRE. It integrates two types of actuators inflated through compressed air: a Contraction Actuator and an Extension Actuator. We evaluate our PneumAct jacket through two user studies with a total of 32 participants: First, we perform a technical evaluation measuring the contraction and extension angles of different inflation patterns and inflation durations. Second, we evaluate PneumAct in three VRE scenarios comparing our system to traditional controller-based vibrotactile and a baseline without haptic feedback.

Abstract

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