Muscle Activity Resulting from Pseudo-haptic Occurrences

To develop a new virtual reality system to support exercise, a method introducing pseudo-haptic cues to control a user’s muscle activity without using a complex haptic device is examined. In this paper, the relationship between pseudo-haptic occurrences and changes in the muscle activity is examined. In the experimental system, the avatar on the computer screen moves in conjunction with the movement of the user’s arm captured by a Kinect sensor. The experimental results suggest that a pseudo-haptic cue is caused by the speedup or slowdown of the avatars and affects the muscle activity.