Learning Chinese Calligraphy in VR With Sponge-Enabled Haptic Feedback

Nowadays, virtual reality (VR) is becoming an important technique for various educational subjects. However, Chinese calligraphy, as a unique artistic form, remains under-explored in terms of learning in a VR configuration. This deficiency is largely due to the challenge to render delicate haptic feedback of pen and brush during the process of writing. To achieve the purpose of haptic rendering, existing works mostly use the professional device (e.g. Phantom), which is expensive and not accessible to common users. Our work presents a novel yet simple approach to render haptic feedback for Chinese calligraphy in VR by using soft and deformable sponge as the medium between the handheld controller and writing surface. We compared three different feedback configurations using on-device vibration and sponge-enabled haptic feedback against the baseline configuration with no force feedback. Based on both the qualitative and quantitative results from user studies, we found that sponge-based haptic feedback not only provided a comfort experience of interactive virtual writing but also accelerated the learning performance of novices. Our approach is low cost, scalable and produces realistic user experience, which offers an alternative solution for future development of training systems for virtual Chinese calligraphy.