Development of MirrorShape: High Fidelity Large-Scale Shape Rendering Framework for Virtual Reality

Abstract

Today there is a high variety of haptic devices capable of providing tactile feedback. Although most of existing designs are aimed at realistic simulation of the surface properties, their capabilities are limited in attempts of displaying shape and position of virtual objects. This paper suggests a new concept of distributed haptic display for realistic interaction with virtual object of complex shape by a collaborative robot with shape display end-effector. MirrorShape renders the 3D object in virtual reality (VR) system by contacting the user hands with the robot end-effector at the calculated point in real-time. Our proposed system makes it possible to synchronously merge the position of contact point in VR and end-effector in real world. This feature provides presentation of different shapes, and at the same time expands the working area comparing to desktop solutions. The preliminary user study revealed that MirrorShape was effective at reducing positional error in VR interactions. Potentially this approach can be used in the virtual systems for rendering versatile VR objects with wide range of sizes with high fidelity large-scale shape experience.