Microsoft Research's haptic retargeting is trying to enhance virtual reality experiences (video)

At ACM CHI 2016, a top conference for Human-Computer Interaction, Microsoft Research is presenting a new paper on a technique called haptic retargeting. In general, manipulating a virtual object with appropriate passive haptic cues provides a satisfying sense of presence in virtual reality. However, supporting multiple virtual objects is a challenge as each one needs to be accompanied with a precisely-located haptic proxy object. Microsoft Research is proposing haptic retargeting that overcomes this limitation by leveraging the dominance of vision when our senses conflict.

With haptic retargeting, a single physical prop can provide passive haptics for multiple virtual objects. We introduce three approaches for dynamically aligning physical and virtual objects: world manipulation, body manipulation and a hybrid technique which combines both world and body manipulation. Our study results indicate that all our haptic retargeting techniques improve the sense of presence when compared to typical wand-based 3D control of virtual objects. Furthermore, our hybrid haptic retargeting achieved the highest satisfaction and presence scores while limiting the visible side-effects during interaction.

Check out the video demo above and visit ACM for more details about this paper.