The core technology at the heart of virtual reality systems is expected to improve steadily. The VR headsets will be fitted with better displays, the wires connecting the user to a PC will disappear, and the content offered will expand greatly. But one area that remains unclear is how to provide physical feedback while in a VR world. The answer to that may come in the form of electric muscle stimulation (EMS).
Pedro Lopes is a computer science PhD student working in the Human Computer Interaction lab of Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute. His research explores the use of haptic feedback to represent objects and walls within virtual reality worlds.
Haptics works by conveying a sense of touch using force and vibrations. In the case of this project, touch and weight feedback were achieved using EMS.
In the video below, the laptop powering the VR experience is located in a backpack, but sitting next to it is a muscle stimulator. When the wearer comes into contact with virtual objects, the EMS system applies a counterforce to appropriate muscles to simulate weight and touch. This could be to represent touching a wall, or lifting objects with a real sense of weight.
The system can cope with stimulating up to four different muscle groups. So feedback can be given for a wide-range of situations and objects, for example, pushing a button, rotating or sliding an object, lifting objects of varying weight, feeling the impact of a projectile, or representing objects such as walls that define a virtual environment's layout.
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One of the problems Lopes and his research team had to overcome was believability. Every object interaction had to feedback to the user the appropriate sensation to represent the object correctly. After extensive testing, two key types of feedback design were found to work well: soft object design and repulsion object design.
With the haptics system remaining as mobile as the user, the obvious next step would be the integration of a camera that maps the real-world environment and adds feedback to it in the VR experience. For now, the system remains a concept, but one that has been proven to work.
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