Using Proxy Haptic for a Pointing Task in the Virtual World: A Usability Study

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) applications are getting progressively more popular in many disciplines. This is mainly due to (1) technological advancement in rendering images and sounds, and (2) immersive experience of VR which intensifies users’ engagement leading to improved joy, sense of presence and success. Although VR creates a realistic experience by simulating visual and auditory sense, it ignores other human senses. The absence of haptic feedback in Virtual Environments (VE) can impair users’ engagement. Our objective is to provide haptic feedback in VE using the most affordable method, proxy haptics. Proxies are physical objects which are co-registered with virtual objects in a way that by touching the proxies, users see their virtual hand touching the virtual objects. So, the haptic feedback will be applied to users’ hands by touching the proxies. The important question which arises here is: what are the influences of providing haptic feedback on users’ performance and usability? In this work, we have designed an experiment in Virtual Reality to answer this question. In the virtual environment, we presented a keyboard with touchable keys and asked our participants to type three words using the keyboard. They repeated the experiment twice: once they used their own hands and pressed the keys and once they used VR controllers for typing. Our results show that participants can type words with fewer errors when they are using their own hands while they found VR controllers easier to use.