A Wired Haptic System for Multimodal VR Interaction

Virtual Reality (VR) technology includes nowadays a wide range of commercially available devices e.g. CAVE systems, reality theatres, power walls, holobenches, individual immersive systems, as well as mixed reality technologies, haptic devices and speech systems. Among the VR technologies, haptics is a key modality as it provides to the virtual objects the sense of being “material” since it is enabling the user to feel their force “reaction”. Out of this, haptic devices serve also for input purposes such as tracking of contact point position. For this reason, haptic devices are becoming more and more sophisticated from the mechanical viewpoint in order to fulfill the wide range of requirements in applications: low inertia, high stiffness, low friction, back-drivability, near-zero backlash, gravitational counter-balancing, sizeable workspace, multiple degrees-of-freedom, and human matched force capabilities. The goal is to build applications, where users can interact using more natural interaction metaphors with the virtual objects. Most commercial haptic interfaces are designed to be used as desktop systems with stereoscopic or monoscopic displays. These devices like PHANToM [16], CyberGrasp [13], Virtuose [10, 12] and others have small workspace and are difficult to use in combination with large scale visualization systems like CAVE [8] or Holobench [22]. For various applications, which involve grasping of complex objects, a special haptic device is needed.