Abstract: FaceHaptics is a novel haptic dis­play based on a robot arm attached to a head-mount­ed vir­tu­al real­i­ty dis­play. It pro­vides local­ized, multi-direc­tion­al and mov­able haptic cues in the form of wind, warmth, moving and single-point touch events and water spray to ded­i­cat­ed parts of the face not cov­ered by the head-mount­ed dis­play. The easily exten­si­ble system, how­ev­er, can prin­ci­pal­ly mount any type of com­pact haptic actu­a­tor or object. User study 1 showed that users appre­ci­ate the direc­tion­al res­o­lu­tion of cues, and can judge wind direc­tion well, espe­cial­ly when they move their head and wind direc­tion is adjust­ed dynam­i­cal­ly to com­pen­sate for head rota­tions. Study 2 showed that adding FaceHaptics cues to a VR walk­through can sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve user expe­ri­ence, pres­ence, and emo­tion­al responses.

[mediatags]facehaptics[/mediatags]

brief system demo video

[youtube yV2Ehux46Zs]

30 sec teaser video

[youtube KcbS4HMKOpc]