Design of Virtual Tea Ceremony "Otemae" from Remote Place Using Haptic Retargeting

Abstract

In recent years, Japanese tea ceremony has become increasingly popular outside of Japan. In Japan, there are many tea ceremony facilities (called chashitsu). However, there is not enough number of both chashitsu, and tea masters outside of Japan. In this paper, we propose virtual chashitsu that allows remotely located tea masters and students to practice Otemae (tea-serving manners) by using a common HMD based VR system. During a tea ceremony, it is important to handle the real tea ceremony sets. Therefore, we place both real and virtual tea sets in the student's side. Here, when the student handle a virtual tea object, he/she also handles the corresponding real tea object. On the other hand, we only place virtual tea sets in the teacher's side. In the Otemae, if the student place a tea object in the wrong position, the tea master adjusts the object position. At that time, discrepancy in the position of the virtual and real tea object may occur at the student's side. In this paper, we employ a haptic retargeting method to solve this positional discrepancy between real and virtual tea objects.