Exploring Interactions with Haptic Feedback in Virtual Reality

Will this mean that people will be able to immerse themselves in games and imulation?   I am not much of a gamer, but like the idea that people will more realistic  'digital twins' to engage with physical objects and spaces.   Consider the future of that.  Its not only game-like controllers, but 'immersive interactions' that can enable us to be part of our physically enabled world.   Inside a 'digital twin'?  A powerful illusion indeed 

Microsoft Research collaborates with KAIST in Korea to explore bimanual interactions with haptic feedback in virtual reality

Published May 6, 2021

By Michel Pahud , Principal Research Software Development Engineer  Mike Sinclair , Senior Principal Researcher  Andrea Bianchi , Associate Professor at KAIST

Editor’s Note: Bimanual controllers are frequently used to enhance the realism and immersion of virtual reality experiences such as games and simulations. Researchers have typically relied on mechanical linkages between the controllers to recreate the sensation of holding different objects with both hands. However, those linkages cannot quickly adapt to simulate dynamic objects. They also make for bulky controllers that can’t be disconnected to support free, independent movements. This is the problem that researchers seek to solve in the recent paper titled “GamesBond: Bimanual Haptic Illusion of Physically Connected Objects for Immersive VR Using Grip Deformation”.

GamesBond is the outcome of a recent collaboration between Michel Pahud and Mike Sinclair from Microsoft Research and Andrea Bianchi, associate professor at KAIST and director of the MAKinteract lab, with two of his students, Neung Ryu, the original author of the paper, and Hye-Young Jo. The paper was accepted at ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), where it received an honorable mention award.

In this project, we explored a pair of novel 4-DoF controllers, without actual physical linkage between them, that can bend, twist, and stretch together in concert to create the illusion of being connected as a single device with a physical link. Each controller can bend from 0 to 30 degrees in any direction, twist from -70 degrees to 70 degrees and stretch from -2.5mm to 9.0mm (the paper provides all the details of the mechanism).  ... "