Haptic Interactions with Virtual Reality

Many possible systems exist that could benefit from Haptic Interactions, the communication of forces between a user and a system. Robotic assisted rehabilitation, interactive Virtual Reality media, and Telerobotics are some examples. However, due to simplified interactions methods, high costs, and lack of application development tools, Haptic Interaction with Virtual Reality has not reached its full potential. As a solution towards these problems, the team created a development platform Haptic Interaction System, capable of supplying Haptic Interactions between a user and hosted simulated environment and objects, along with the tools to enhance the system and develop applications based on Haptic Interactions

Wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand: taxonomy, review and perspectives

In the last decade, we have witnessed a drastic change in the form factor of audio and vision technologies, from heavy and grounded machines to lightweight devices that naturally fit our bodies. However, only recently, haptic systems have started to be designed with wearability in mind. The wearability of haptic systems enables novel forms of communication, cooperation, and integration between humans and machines. Wearable haptic interfaces are capable of communicating with the human wearers during their interaction with the environment they share, in a natural and yet private way. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand, focusing on those systems directly addressing wearability challenges. The paper also discusses the main technological and design challenges for the development of wearable haptic interfaces, and it reports on the future perspectives of the field. Finally, the paper includes two tables summarizing the characteristics and features of the most representative wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand

Multimodality with Eye tracking and Haptics: A New Horizon for Serious Games?

The goal of this review is to illustrate the emerging use of multimodal virtual reality that can benefit learning-based games. The review begins with an introduction to multimodal virtual reality in serious games and we provide a brief discussion of why cognitive processes involved in learning and training are enhanced under immersive virtual environments. We initially outline studies that have used eye tracking and haptic feedback independently in serious games, and then review some innovative applications that have already combined eye tracking and haptic devices in order to provide applicable multimodal frameworks for learning-based games. Finally, some general conclusions are identified and clarified in order to advance current understanding in multimodal serious game production as well as exploring possible areas for new applications

An investigation of effects of the partial active assistance in a virtual environment based rehabilitation system

This thesis describes a study on a new active assistance in robotic rehabilitation in a haptic virtual environment for post-stroke patients. The novelty of this active assistance system lies in that the assistance is directly rendered on the result of a task performing. Active assistance will generally raise the confidence level of patients in performing a rehabilitation exercise. However, an overly high assistance level may induce cognitive fatigue with patients and thus decreases their motivation of performing a rehabilitation exercise. This thesis hypothesizes that a proper active assistance can improve the performance of a rehabilitation exercise, but will not reduce the motivation of patients in doing rehabilitation exercise. However, due to the difficulty in obtaining a proper number of patients for the experiment, the study turned to healthy people. Accordingly, a revised hypothesis is that active assistance on healthy people does not improve the task performance and not reduces the motivation of healthy people. In this thesis, first, a test-bed with the haptic virtual environment was designed and constructed. The test-bed included a simple task – i.e., following a predefined circle trajectory. Then, a statistical experiment was designed and an experiment was conducted on the test-bed. The experimental results test the hypothesis successfully. The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) the development of a new active assistance system for rehabilitation in a virtual environment and (2) the experimental study on the motivation of healthy people with the developed active assistance system. A care must, however, be taken that the experiment was conducted on healthy people and the conclusion drawn from the study may not be valid on patients

A survey of haptics in serious gaming

Serious gaming often requires high level of realism for training and learning purposes. Haptic technology has been proved to be useful in many applications with an additional perception modality complementary to the audio and the vision. It provides novel user experience to enhance the immersion of virtual reality with a physical control-layer. This survey focuses on the haptic technology and its applications in serious gaming. Several categories of related applications are listed and discussed in details, primarily on haptics acts as cognitive aux and main component in serious games design. We categorize haptic devices into tactile, force feedback and hybrid ones to suit different haptic interfaces, followed by description of common haptic gadgets in gaming. Haptic modeling methods, in particular, available SDKs or libraries either for commercial or academic usage, are summarized. We also analyze the existing research difficulties and technology bottleneck with haptics and foresee the future research directions

A Review of Non-Invasive Haptic Feedback stimulation Techniques for Upper Extremity Prostheses

A sense of touch is essential for amputees to reintegrate into their social and work life. The design of the next generation of the prostheses will have the ability to effectively convey the tactile information between the amputee and the artificial limbs. This work reviews non-invasive haptic feedback stimulation techniques to convey the tactile information from the prosthetic hand to the amputee’s brain. Various types of actuators that been used to stimulate the patient’s residual limb for different types of artificial prostheses in previous studies have been reviewed in terms of functionality, effectiveness, wearability and comfort. The non-invasive hybrid feedback stimulation system was found to be better in terms of the stimulus identification rate of the haptic prostheses’ users. It can be conclude that integrating hybrid haptic feedback stimulation system with the upper limb prostheses leads to improving its acceptance among users