MultiVibes: What if your VR Controller had 10 Times more Vibrotactile Actuators?

Grégoire Richard1, Thomas Pietrzak1, Ferran Argelaguet2, Anatole Lécuyer2, Géry Casiez1,3
1Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL, Lille, France, 2Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique, Rennes, France, 3Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), Paris, France

This page provides additional material to our IEEE ISMAR 2023 paper.

Consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) controllers are typically equipped with one vibrotactile actuator, allowing to create simple and non-spatialized tactile sensations through the vibration of the entire controller. Leveraging the funneling effect, an illusion in which multiple vibrations are perceived as a single one, we propose MultiVibes, a VR controller capable of rendering spatialized sensations at different locations on the user’s hand and fingers. The designed prototype includes ten vibrotactile actuators, directly in contact with the skin of the hand, limiting the propagation of vibrations through the controller. We evaluated MultiVibes through two controlled experiments. The first one focused on the ability of users to recognize spatio-temporal patterns, while the second one focused on the impact of MultiVibes on the users’ haptic experience when interacting with virtual objects they can feel. Taken together, the results show that MultiVibes is capable of providing accurate spatialized feedback and that users prefer MultiVibes over traditional VR controllers.

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References

Richard, G., Pietrzak, T., Argelaguet, F., Lécuyer, A. & Casiez, G. (2023). MultiVibes: What if your VR Controller had 10 Times more Vibrotactile Actuators? In proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), IEEE.