Hands-free vibrotactile feedback for object selection tasks in virtual reality

Abstract

Interactions between humans and virtual environments rely on timely and consistent sensory feedback, including haptic feedback. However, many questions remain open concerning the spatial location of haptics on the user's body in VR. We studied how simple vibrotactile collision feedback on two less studied locations, the temples, and the wrist, affects an object picking task in a VR environment. We compared visual feedback to three visual-haptic conditions, providing haptic feedback on the participants' (N=16) wrists, temples or simultaneously on both locations. The results indicate that for continuous, hand-based object selection, the wrist is a more promising feedback location than the temples. Further, even a suboptimal feedback location may be better than no haptic collision feedback at all.