Abstract
In the current consumer market, Virtual reality experiences are predominantly generated through visual and auditory feedback. Haptics are not yet well established, but are increasingly introduced to enhance the user’s sense of ‘reality’. With haptic (vibrotactile) feedback now part of the built-in mechanism of VR consumer devices, there is an urgent need to understand how different modalities work together to improve the user experience. This paper reports an experiment that explores the contributions made to participants’ sense of presence by haptic and visual feedback in a virtual environment. Participants experienced a virtual ball bouncing on a virtual stick resting across their avatar hands. We found that presence was enhanced when they could both see and feel the ball’s action; with a strong suggestion that haptic feedback alone gave rise to a greater sense of presence than visual alone. Similarly, whilst visual or bimodal feedback enhanced participants’ ability to locate where the ball bounced on the stick, our results suggest that the action itself was more readily discerned haptically than visually.
Highlights
Virtual Reality (VR) has been described by Lanier (2017) as “the substitution of the interface between a person and their physical environment with an interface to a simulated environment”
sensorimotor contingencies’ (SMCs) are represented in current VR systems: if multimodal imagery can compensate for absent modalities, how does this affect presence? In the present study, we explore the effects on presence of visual only feedback (‘minus haptic’), haptic only (‘minus visual’) and both together
Haptic feedback in the Touch controller is supplied by a vibrating motor, so a single, clean impact cannot be delivered; rather, we looked for a burst of vibration short enough to feel like an impact, but long enough to be clearly detectable
Summary
Virtual Reality (VR) has been described by Lanier (2017) as (among other things) “the substitution of the interface between a person and their physical environment with an interface to a simulated environment”. The perceptual interface is of particular significance in understand ing presence in virtual environments. The literature suggests a core aspect, described as “spatial presence”, “place illusion”, or “being there”, that is central to presence. This is widely understood to be dependent on the nature, extent and veridicality of our sensorimotor interaction with the virtual environment, and how that relates to our normal engagement with the real world
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