Experience Haptics Seamlessly Across Virtual and Real Worlds

Haptic feedback has been an important contributor to enabling more immersive and dexterous experiences in virtual worlds. Yet achieving realistic haptic feedback is not trivial. Take tactile feedback for example, our skin can sense complex sensations (e.g., vibration, pressure, temperature) with high sensitivity and wide range. Attempting to render all these complex sensations has led to very realistic haptic devices, but, these are necessarily cumbersome and obstructive (e.g., haptic gloves that need to cover the whole hand with several actuators). While this might be fine in VR where users only interact with virtual objects, this is completely at odds with every other interface paradigm, such as Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality, in which users not only interact with virtual objects but also with their surroundings (e.g., tool manipulation). We argue that to make haptic devices available to use beyond VR, we must design for the integration between the haptic device and the real world. To this end, we demonstrate new approaches to engineering haptics devices that allow users to feel haptics from the real world and augment haptics to the real world. With this shift in haptics, we believe that in the future, users will be able to enjoy the benefits of haptics without needing to choose between either only a virtual world with haptics or a real world without—instead, experiencing haptics seamlessly across both real and virtual worlds.