Sensory Trick for VR

Another sense covered?

Sensory Trick Makes Objects Seem Heavy or Light in VR

By New Scientist, September 13, 2022

Vibrating pads on people's arms can support a more convincing illusion of weight in virtual reality (VR) by fooling the brain into ignoring certain sensory input.

Yutaro Hirao and colleagues at Japan's University of Tokyo placed vibrating motors above tendons in the arm to add noise to signals from sensors called proprioceptors, causing the brain to rely more on visual information communicated by VR.

An experiment simulated different weights by changing the variance between the users' hand movements and the virtual objects they were manipulating.

The researchers observed that adding tendon vibration gave the illusion greater persistence.

"The brain starts to feel like 'oh, the haptic information is now useless, so let's rely more on visual information to make the final decision to define our perception'," Hirao explained.

From New Scientist

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Eliminating the Checkout Line

Not really a self-checkout.  And not an item-tagged RFID enabled checkout, which we also tested.  But here something completely different. A checkout  based on individual item weights. No lines at all.  Described in InsideRetail:  " ... Equipped with highly-sensitive scales, a ShelfX Smart Shelf knows the exact item and quantity of the item being stocked. When a shopper approaches the shelf with an RFID-enabled ShelfX Card to take an item, the ShelfX system greets the customer by name, tells them what they have purchased, offers discounts and additional suggestions based on their customer profile, and processes their payment. On the back-end, the inventory is automatically updated. “The obvious benefit here is for the shopper. They come in, take their items and leave; no hassles, no waiting in lines,” explains Margalit.... "