Adaptic, A Shape Changing Prop with Haptic Retargeting
We present Adaptic, a novel haptic device that can reconfigure itself to provide a physical proxy for a range of virtual objects in virtual reality (VR) applications. Adaptic provides the benefits of shape changing devices and relies on visual dominance in VR to serve as a general-purpose prop. In addition, we situate our novel hybrid haptic device in the context of haptic retargeting, a technique that redirects the user’s hand to provide haptic feedback for several virtual objects within their arm reach using only one shape-changing, physical device. We conducted a 4x2x10 within-subjects experiment employing a docking task to evaluate effectiveness and overall experience of using Adaptic compared to non-matching proxy objects (i.e., Styrofoam balls) and matching 3D printed shapes. Our results indicate that the Adaptic’s performance was comparable to other props without haptic retargeting in terms of completion time, position error, and angle error. Moreover, we found that users felt they were manipulating several virtual objects with only one Adaptic. Our major contributions include design considerations and a hardware implementation of our prototype.
People
