Feel-through Haptic Feedback for Augmented and Virtual Reality

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR), often summarized as Extended Reality (XR), is moving from a niche product to a mainstream market. Due to recent advances in wearable sensing and display technologies, powerful VR and AR headsets are commercially available, even for the general public, and promise to become even more miniaturized and cheaper in the coming years. A myriad of important application cases, ranging from gaming or shopping to immersive design and engineering or to tele-surgery and virtual training, demonstrate the large innovation potential of XR. However, today’s technologies and applications for XR predominantly focus on the visual channel alone. In contrast, rendering the haptic feel of objects in XR is still mostly unaddressed, although it is common knowledge that haptic perception is an essential part of how humans experience the world, hence important for realism and immersion. This project sets out to mature the crucial components needed for feel-through tactile feedback in XR that can dynamically augment and alter the haptic feel of real-world objects, surfaces, and the human body. Our technology originates from the applicant’s ERC Starting Grant InteractiveSkin, where we developed the foundations for a new generation of body-worn user interfaces, which we call interactive skin. Our approach is unique in proposing computational design and rapid manufacturing of stretchable electronics as a means to customize on-body interfaces. FEEL-XR will enable tactile augmentation of the human body through a less than 35 μm thin tactile interface for wearable computing, which retains the natural tactile acuity (similar to bare skin) while delivering high-density tactile output, suitable for applications in tactile XR and on-skin interaction. As there are no moving parts, we can expect our technology to be built much cheaper than current solutions that rely on motors or pneumatics, at the same time being better suited for battery-powered usages.