Haptic Ankle Platform for Interactive Walking in Virtual Reality

This article presents an impedance type ankle haptic interface for providing users with an immersive navigation experience in virtual reality (VR). The ankle platform, actuated by an electric motor with feedback control, enables the use of foot-tapping gestures to create a walking experience like a real one and to haptically render different types of walking terrains. Experimental studies demonstrated that the interface can be easily used to generate virtual walking and is capable of rendering terrains, such as hard and soft surfaces, and multi-layer complex dynamic terrains. The designed system is a seated-type VR locomotion interface, therefore allowing its user to maintain a stable seated posture to comfortably navigate a virtual scene.