A new dimension of immersiveness into virtual reality through haptic technology

Abstract

Computers have come a long way from displaying the information through pixels to completely creating the 3-D virtual environments but the way in which we interact with these systems has not changed much. For decades now the input and the output to the systems have been only in audio and visual (image and video) formats. Therefore even the interaction with the created 3D virtual environments is also happening only by utilizing these audio visual elements and thereby surpassing the true potential of the 3D worlds. This void can be filled by introducing the ‘sense of touch’ into the virtual world objects and creating a mechanism to let the user physically interact with the virtual objects. It can be achieved through haptic feedback device mechanism. The haptic technology helps the user experience the various physical sensations like touch, texture, density, strength, smoothness or roughness, friction of the virtual objects. So when the brain is fed with physical stimulus combined with the audio visual information of the virtual environment a user can truly have an immersive virtual reality experience. This paper describes how and where the concept of haptics is currently used and proposed a new framework to create a truly immersive virtual experience to the user using haptic technology.