Pseudo-Haptics Survey: Human-Computer Interaction in Extended Reality and Teleoperation

Abstract

Humans perceive haptic sensations when manipulating physical objects. Research on haptic devices aims to enable haptic perception, mainly when people interact with virtual or remote environments. One of the significant challenges for a better immersive experience in such environments is the absence of haptic feedback and naturalness, for example, when considering mid-air gesture interactions, where users are not holding a physical device or controller in their hands. Like haptic devices, pseudo-haptic techniques aim to simulate haptic sensations in human–computer interaction between real and virtual worlds. Pseudo-haptics forgo haptic device actuators by exploring multimodal feedback, mainly the visual, and the brain’s capabilities and limitations in human visual-haptic integration. Motivating many studies, pseudo-haptic techniques offer cost advantages with better mobility, portability, and flexibility, without needing a haptic device to be attached or applied to the body, alongside hardware weight, seize, power consumption, and maintenance constraints. Literature continues to be published in this area, simulating a wider variety of techniques and new application areas. In recent years mainly focused on extended reality and mid-air interactions. This ongoing increase in scholarly interest motivated this survey, which proposes a taxonomy that includes pseudo-haptics tactile feedback, kinesthetic feedback, and composite categories. The authors further explore the multimodal approaches and the survey findings identify areas for future research work, notably combining multimodal techniques, for more immersive extended reality and collaborative virtual environments.

Topics & Concepts