A Demonstration of Haptic Retargeting: Dynamic Repurposing of Passive Haptics for Enhanced Virtual Reality Experience

Manipulating a virtual object with appropriate passive haptic cues provides a satisfying sense of presence in virtual reality. However, scaling such experiences to support multiple virtual objects is a challenge as each one needs to be accompanied with a precisely-located haptic proxy object. We showcase a solution that overcomes this limitation by hacking human perception. Our framework for repurposing passive haptics, called haptic retargeting, leverages 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: body manipulation, world manipulation and a hybrid technique which combines both world and body manipulation. This demonstration accompanies our CHI 2016 paper.