An Object Synthesis Method to Enhance Visuo-Haptic Consistency

The sense of reality is enhanced by presenting appropriate haptic feedback when the user interacts with a virtual object in virtual reality (VR). To present appropriate feedback, we often use a real object that resembles the virtual one to manipulate. However, such a real object is not always available. The user may feel a visuo-haptic inconsistency between real and virtual objects when their shapes are different. To alleviate such an inconsistency, we propose a novel object synthesis method that combines the shape of the real object that the user manipulates in reality and the shape of the virtual object which was to be presented to the user in VR. In other words, this synthesized object, a chimera object, is created by transforming the part of the virtual object that the user would touch into a shape that is similar to the corresponding part of the real object while maintaining the other parts of the virtual object intact. The expected haptic sensation from the appearance of our chimera object is more consistent with the one produced by the real object. Therefore, the visuo-haptic inconsistency is expected to alleviate in VR, compared to the original virtual object. In addition, we propose an interactive system to support the design of a chimera object for users. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted two user studies. The first experiment confirmed that our proposed chimera object helps enhance visuo-haptic consistency. The second experiment confirmed that our system was effective for chimera object creation by users with acceptable system usability.