Wearable hAptics for Virtual realitY – WAVY

Virtual Reality (VR) has been gaining increasing interest in recent years in the consumer market, with impactful advances in headsets, controllers, and the visual and audio renderings. However, a truly successful and complete VR experience relies on using all the sensory modalities and providing the user with the illusion they are evolving in a realistic world. To that effect, convincing haptic feedback, which enables to touch and feel during interaction, is crucially missing. Yet, to date, there are no wearable haptic peripherals available that provide a compelling feedback in its various forms (tactile, force, etc.). Many challenges still remain to providing the wide range of haptic sensations, especially in a low-cost and wearable or non-tethering device that is, in addition, accessible to the public. With the public as the new target, novel solutions need to be investigated, which not only build upon recent technological advances but also take advantage of the high-fidelity multisensory feedback now available to overcome current technical limitations and to provide a richer experience involving emotions and cognitive illusions. Moreover, another long-standing limitation impairing the wide adoption of haptics is the difficulty of creating and integrating compelling haptic feedback into a VR environment, in particular by non-experts. Therefore, this project aims to tackle this new demand and the associated challenges by providing the next-generation haptic wearable for VR/XR and covering the whole haptic design chain.
More specifically, the goals of WAVY are:
• To design the next-generation, lightweight, compact, and cost-effective wearable for providing kinaesthetic, vibrotactile and skin pressure feedback to VR.
• To investigate the combination of multimodal feedback (visual, auditory, and haptics) for compelling perceptual illusions to provide richer feedback and user experience.
• To pursue research in the haptic creation process and the development of a framework for “generic haptics”, i.e. facilitating the design of haptic feedbacks for VR irrespective of the device used and its capabilities, and accessible to non-experts in haptics.
• To integrate the findings and the novel device into an industrial use case focusing on presence and skills training and into an artistic project for dissemination to the public and other sectors
• To evaluate the device and framework from a user-centred design perspective on various key aspects including the usability, overall “performance” and experience of target users.
• To create the necessary conditions for transferring this knowledge to industrials (& academics) interested in these technologies, which can, in turn, increase their market opportunities.

To achieve these ambitious goals, WAVY will follow an iterative approach combining research, design and evaluation, and will involve academic partners experts in haptics and neurosciences (CEA, ISIR), a cutting-edge haptic SME (GTVR) and an association bridging arts and science, with a renowned artist in residence (AAS). With these goals and this consortium, WAVY aims to cover the whole design process, from providing a wearable with a wide range of feedbacks (vibrations, skin pressure, resistive feedback), to making accessible a software solution for prototyping haptic interactions, that interfaces transparently with any existing haptic device, finally to showcasing potential VR applications via the artistic and industrial use cases.