Introduction
What we feel from handling liquids in vessels produces unmistakable fluid tactile sensations. These produce essential feedback in home, laboratory, or industrial contexts. Feeling fluid interactions from virtual fluids would similarly enrich experiences in virtual reality. We introduce Geppetteau, a novel string-driven weight shifting mechanism capable of mimicking tactile sensations of handling liquids in VR within a variety of vessel shapes.
Key Goals
- Immersion: Provide believable tactile experiences for multiple liquids and containers in virtual experiences.
- Support skill development: Create a system that would increase accessibility of lab settings to students in different STEM fields and further the understanding of fluid dynamics.
User Studies
Three user studies were conducted to study Geppetteau. For the first study, we wanted to understand how the weight shifting or lack thereof impacted the user’s experience. We compared an active weight Geppetteau system to a baseline of no haptic feedback which was a Vive controller, and a Geppetteau system with an unmoving static weight. The virtual fluid was visible in each condition.
In the second user study, we sought to understand how well our active weight Geppetteau system could replicate haptic sensations of virtual fluids across different vessel profiles and how visual dominance influenced the tactile sensations perceived by the user.
For our third user study, We hypothesized that the Geppetteau system could produce haptic sensations of various fluid behaviors thus enhancing practical and imagined applications of handling virtual fluids. We developed an immersive space adventure to demonstrate the different liquid interactions provided by our Geppetteau system.
Conclusion
We found that the Vive controller and static weight physical proxy were insufficient in providing the tactile experience of handling virtual fluids in vessels. This demonstrates a need for providing congruent haptic sensations to the moving virtual fluids, which can be achieved with an actively shifting weight inside the vessel.
We found from study 2 that our device was able to provide the haptic sensation of feeling virtual liquids inside a vessel even when users couldn’t see the virtual fluids. When users saw the virtual fluid in correspondence with the tactile sensations, the haptic illusion was strengthened. We believe that these visual haptic illusions can be applied to weight and size.
In our immersive space adventure, users who were able to feel the chemical reactions responded positively to the experience demonstrating Geppetteau’s ability to be integrated into real-world applications such as virtual chemistry, workforce training and education.
