Haptic Feedback is essential for lifelike Virtual Reality (VR) experiences. To provide a wide range of matching sensations of being touched or stroked, current approaches typically need large numbers of different physical textures. However, even advanced devices can only accommodate a limited number of textures to remain wearable. Therefore, a better understanding is necessary of how expectations elicited by different visualizations affect haptic perception, to achieve a balance between physical constraints and great variety of matching physical textures. In this work, we conducted an experiment (N=31) assessing how the perception of roughness is affected within VR. We designed a prototype for arm stroking and compared the effects of different visualizations on the perception of physical textures with distinct roughnesses. Additionally, we used the visualizations' real-world materials, no-haptics and vibrotactile feedback as baselines. As one result, we found that two levels of roughness can be sufficient to convey a realistic illusion.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517454
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)