Touch It Like It's Hot: A Thermal Feedback Enabled Encountered-type Haptic Display for Virtual Reality

Steeven Villa, Kenji Ishihara, Moritz Ziarko, Sebastian Günther, Florian Müller

ISMAR 2024

IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR'24) 2024

TL;DR

What we did: We designed and implemented a novel Encountered-type Haptic Display that incorporates thermal feedback to enhance user experiences in Virtual Reality.

What we found: We found that the addition of thermal feedback significantly improves user immersion and haptic realism during virtual interactions compared to traditional haptic methods without temperature feedback.

Takeaway: Our results suggest that integrating thermal feedback into haptic displays can substantially enrich Virtual Reality experiences, making them more dynamic and realistic.

Abstract

In recent years, the community has presented various novel solutions to address the lack of haptic feedback in virtual reality experiences. Yet, it remains a major challenge for Virtual Reality applications. Encountered-type Haptic Displays (ETHDs) have emerged as a promising alternative to enable haptic feedback in VR without requiring the user to wear any device while allowing for sensorily rich experiences such as texture, kinaesthetic feedback, and even ultrasonic tactile feedback. Nevertheless, as important as thermal feedback is for daily life interactions, such as assessing the temperature of a mug or knowing if the microwave is on, thermal feedback in ETHD has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a novel ETHD that provides thermal feedback and explore its potential in VR. We describe the design of our ETHD, and we report the results of a user study that compares different thermal feedback settings in VR. Our results show that thermal feedback can significantly enhance the user immersion and haptic experience in VR, and we discuss the implications of our findings for the design of ETHD and VR experiences.

Abstract

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