Engineering Haptic Technologies for Interaction in Virtual and Augmented Reality

A longstanding goal in engineering research has been to realize haptic displays for virtual reality that allow their users to touch and manipulate virtual objects which feel realistic. Despite decades of research, this goal remains far from being achieved. Motivated by the challenges involved, this PhD contributes new research findings on perceptual and physical mechanisms of human touch perception, and applies this knowledge for the engineering of efficient haptic technologies for virtual and augmented reality. The first part of the PhD is motivated by the active nature of haptic perception. During haptic exploration of objects, proprioceptive information about movements of the hands and fingers is integrated with tactile sensory information elicited via touch contact in order to facilitate perceptual judgements about object properties or events. Surprisingly little is known about human abilities to spatially localize the fingers via proprioception. The first part of the dissertation presents findings from perceptual investigations using a novel virtual reality paradigm. The results reveal that errors in spatial localization of the fingers are surprisingly large, averaging several centimeters per finger, but are strongly refined by even partial visual cues about the positions of adjacent fingers. The results also provide critical information that is needed in order to specify performance requirements for virtual reality technologies, including hand tracking systems.The next part of this PhD addresses another key aspect in engineering haptic interactions: that of furnishing touch sensations to the skin. A central challenge in haptic engineering is that the skin is an extended sensory medium with high spatial resolution. While many prior haptic devices have been designed to use numerous actuators, such devices are too bulky, costly, and complex for practical application. This PhD proposes a new design strategy that exploits the physics of waves in the skin. First, fi