Haptic Vibration for Emotional Expression of Avatar to Enhance the Realism of Virtual Reality

This paper intends to show the importance of haptic vibration to support emotional expression of avatar in virtual reality systems. As we know emotional avatar plays a vital role to improve the degree of realism in virtual reality. Current practice in virtual reality still lack of interactivity and immersiveness. In this research, we aim to create a realistic avatar based on haptic tactile frequency. The created avatar will be equipped with some intelligence and emotional features in order to support the interactive communication in virtual reality. Using several level of emotion strengths, the created avatar are ask to communicate their emotion through tactile frequency and operated synchronously with the avatar facial expression, acoustic representation and action-reaction between avatars. Several experiments have been conducted based on particular frequencies of haptic tactile to show the visibility of haptic emotional avatar expression. The results proved that the use of several levels of emotion strengths is able to create very realistic avatar expression.