Using a vibro-tactile display for enhanced collision perception and presence

One of the goals and means of realizing virtual reality is through multimodal interfaces, leveraging on the many sensory organs that humans possess. Among them, the tactile sense is important and useful for close range interaction and manipulation tasks. In this paper, we explore this possibility using a vibro-tactile device on the whole body for simulating collision between the user and virtual environment. We first experimentally verify the effect of enhanced user felt presence by employing localized vibration feedback alone on collision, and further investigate how to effectively provide the sense of collision using the vibro-tactile display in different ways. In particular, we test the effects of using a vibration feedback model (for simulating collision with different object materials), saltation, and simultaneous use of 3D sound toward spatial presence and perceptual realism. The results have shown that employing the proposed vibro-tactile interface did enhance the sense of presence, especially when combined with 3D sound. Furthermore, the use of saltation also helped the user detect and localize the point of contact more correctly. The use of the vibration feedback model was not found to be significantly effective, and sometimes even hindered the correct sense of collision primarily due to the limitation of the vibrotactile display device.