Sense of touch is an important part of any experience. But how can you simulate touch in a virtual world? This is done through haptics. To create a truly immersive experience, gloves, controllers, sticks and other objects help represent virtual touch. Gloves allow users to effectively pick up objects by sensing when hands are open or closed. Controllers vibrate to simulate the sense of texture. Haptic technology provides numerous possibilities to simulate touch in virtual worlds.
In virtual reality, you can see the virtual world and hear sounds around you. But what about the sense of touch? For that, we offer touch-based sensations through what’s called “haptics”. Different gloves, controllers, and other tangible objects serve as physical proxies for users to touch real physical objects, through which virtual touch can be represented.
To render haptic sensations, it is important to spatially track where the haptic proxies are. Whether it’s a glove, controller, stick, or ball, the object needs to look like it’s in the right place for it to feel like it’s in the right place. Whether using attached trackers connected to VR tracking infrastructure or using headset cameras to see rapidly blinking light patterns, the VR system needs to feed the pose of the trackable objects into the game engine to complete the illusion of visual-haptic object presence.
The controller grip buttons and trigger buttons can be mapped to virtual hands to allow the user to interact with virtual objects to pick them up or throw them, or to point to and interact with menus. Similarly, glove based devices can detect when the hand is open or closed, allowing the user to pick up different virtual objects. Paired with the tracking, these grip-based sensors allow these virtual interactions to happen via the game engine.
To give sensations when a glove or controller interacts with a virtual object or surface, the device usually offers feedback in the form of vibration. These vibration patterns give a sensation of texture, and their intensity gives a sensation of forcefulness. Some advanced gloves also vibrate on the fingertips for additional sensory precision. Some gloves also offer force feedback by pulling back the fingers through string-based restraint systems. One way or another, these sensations give users the impression that they’re not only seeing the virtual world, but that they’re feeling the world through their hands and fingertips.