Expanding the User Interactions and Design Process of Haptic Experiences in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality can be a highly immersive experience due to its realistic visual presentation. This immersive state is useful for applications including education, training, and entertainment. To enhance the state of immersion provided by virtual reality further, devices capable of simulating touch and force have been researched to allow not only a visual and audio experience but a haptic experience as well. Such research has investigated many approaches to generating haptics for virtual reality but often does not explore how to create an immersive haptic experience using them. In this thesis, we present a discussion on four proposed areas of the virtual reality haptic experience design process using a demonstration methodology. To investigate the application of haptic devices, we designed a modular ungrounded haptic system which was used to create a general-purpose device capable of force-based feedback and used it in the three topics of exploration. The first area explored is the application of existing haptic theory for aircraft control to the field of virtual reality drone control. The second area explored is the presence of the size-weight sensory illusion within virtual reality when using a simulated haptic force. The third area explored is how authoring within a virtual reality medium can be used by a designer to create VR haptic experiences. From these explorations, we begin a higher-level discussion of the broader process of creating a virtual reality haptic experience. Using the results of each project as a representation of our proposed design steps, we discuss not only the broader concepts the steps contribute to the process and their importance, but also draw connections between them. By doing this, we present a more holistic approach to the large-scale design of virtual reality haptic experiences and the benefits we believe it provides

A Systematic Review of Weight Perception in Virtual Reality: Techniques, Challenges, and Road Ahead

Weight is perceived through the combination of multiple sensory systems, and a wide range of factors – including touch, visual, and force senses – can influence the perception of heaviness. There have been remarkable advancements in the development of haptic interfaces throughout the years. However, a number of challenges limit the progression to enable humans to sense the weight in virtual reality (VR). This article presents an overview of the factors that influence how weight is perceived and the phenomenon that contributes to various types of weight illusions. A systematic review has been undertaken to assess the development of weight perception in VR, underlying haptic technology that renders the mass of a virtual object, and the creation of weight perception through pseudo-haptic. We summarize the approaches from the perspective of haptic and pseudo-haptic cues that exhibit the sense of weight such as force, skin deformation, vibration, inertia, control–display ratio, velocity, body gestures, and audio–visual representation. The design challenges are underlined, and research gaps are discussed, including accuracy and precision, weight discrimination, heavyweight rendering, and absolute weight simulation. This article is anticipated to aid in the development of more realistic weight perception in VR and stimulated new research interest in this topic

Ubiquitous haptic feedback in human-computer interaction through electrical muscle stimulation

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A novel parametric scale for determining rehabilitation progress in the upper limb

PhD ThesisThe process of sensorimotor rehabilitation depends upon the clinical condition, age and circumstances of the patient and is unlikely to be continuous or predictable in nature. Mapping progress in conditions such as stroke, cerebral palsy and traumatic brain injury relies upon a variety of qualitative assessments, each resulting in different scales of measurement. Most current assessments are elaborate, specific to certain participants and/or stages of a condition, and subject to inter-rater and intra-rater variability. A simple and reliable measuring system is required that can capture rehabilitation progress from an initial state through to complete rehabilitation. It must be believable, flexible, understandable and accessible if the patient is to benefit from its use. Two-dimensional reaching tasks reflect movements made in typical therapies and activities of daily living. This thesis hypothesises that valuable parameters exist within positional and temporal data gathered from simple reaching tasks. Such parameters should be able to identify movement quality and hence measure state and progress during rehabilitation. They should correlate well with a variety of clinical scales to be meaningful and, as quantifiable measurands, they should be extendable beyond the range of established clinical scales. This thesis proposes a novel solution for the assessment of upper limb rehabilitation. An affordable desktop computer assessment system was developed and used with juvenile patient participants (N=11) to compare simple desktop reaching parameters with a clinical scale. A control group of normal juvenile participants (N=10) provided baseline data. The results indicated good correlation with the clinical scale based upon a weighted combination of pre-selected movement parameters. The methodology developed permits assessment against further clinical scales and additional participant groups allowing rapid, accurate, reliable and extendable assessments. The potential for mass data acquisition from clinical and domestic settings is identified to support the development of further assessments and, potentially, new therapies to address limited therapist availability and innovative treatments

Where is cognition? Towards an embodied, situated, and distributed interactionist theory of cognitive activity

In recent years researchers from a variety of cognitive science disciplines have begun to challenge some of the core assumptions of the dominant theoretical framework of cognitivism including the representation-computational view of cognition, the sense-model-plan-act understanding of cognitive architecture, and the use of a formal task description strategy for investigating the organisation of internal mental processes. Challenges to these assumptions are illustrated using empirical findings and theoretical arguments from the fields such as situated robotics, dynamical systems approaches to cognition, situated action and distributed cognition research, and sociohistorical studies of cognitive development. Several shared themes are extracted from the findings in these research programmes including: a focus on agent-environment systems as the primary unit of analysis; an attention to agent-environment interaction dynamics; a vision of the cognizer's internal mechanisms as essentially reactive and decentralised in nature; and a tendency for mutual definitions of agent, environment, and activity. It is argued that, taken together, these themes signal the emergence of a new approach to cognition called embodied, situated, and distributed interactionism. This interactionist alternative has many resonances with the dynamical systems approach to cognition. However, this approach does not provide a theory of the implementing substrate sufficient for an interactionist theoretical framework. It is suggested that such a theory can be found in a view of animals as autonomous systems coupled with a portrayal of the nervous system as a regulatory, coordinative, and integrative bodily subsystem. Although a number of recent simulations show connectionism's promise as a computational technique in simulating the role of the nervous system from an interactionist perspective, this embodied connectionist framework does not lend itself to understanding the advanced 'representation hungry' cognition we witness in much human behaviour. It is argued that this problem can be solved by understanding advanced cognition as the re-use of basic perception-action skills and structures that this feat is enabled by a general education within a social symbol-using environment