An Overview of Wearable Haptic Technologies and Their Performance in Virtual Object Exploration

Myla van Wegen, Just L. Herder, Rolf Adelsberger, Manuela Pastore-Wapp, Erwin E. H. van Wegen, Stephan Bohlhalter, Tobias Nef, Paul Krack, Tim Vanbellingen

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articleAcademicpeer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We often interact with our environment through manual handling of objects and exploration of their properties. Object properties (OP), such as texture, stiffness, size, shape, temperature, weight, and orientation provide necessary information to successfully perform interactions. The human haptic perception system plays a key role in this. As virtual reality (VR) has been a growing field of interest with many applications, adding haptic feedback to virtual experiences is another step towards more realistic virtual interactions. However, integrating haptics in a realistic manner, requires complex technological solutions and actual user-testing in virtual environments (VEs) for verification. This review provides a comprehensive overview of recent wearable haptic devices (HDs) categorized by the OP exploration for which they have been verified in a VE. We found 13 studies which specifically addressed user-testing of wearable HDs in healthy subjects. We map and discuss the different technological solutions for different OP exploration which are useful for the design of future haptic object interactions in VR, and provide future recommendations.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1563
JournalSENSORS
Volume23
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2023

Keywords

  • VR system
  • haptics
  • object exploration
  • object interaction
  • overview
  • virtual reality
  • wearable

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