Heavy Haptics: Simulating Weight in Virtual Reality Applications

Virtual Reality technologies have drastically improved over the last few years, but the physical experience of interacting with virtual objects and mass is still quite limited. Specially developed controllers and gloves technically exist, but most are still in development and not yet established as readily available industry solutions. This paper introduces “Heavy Haptics”, a novel haptic approach that combines offset tracking, rumble feedback and pressure sensors to elicit the sensation of weight without the need for dedicated hardware. We review related works on weight simulation to derive our design and present a quantitative evaluation method. To assess the system, we conducted a small pilot experiment with four VR experts. Our results suggest that Heavy Haptics is comparable to more sophisticated solutions using dedicated hardware. However, additional studies confirming our results need to be conducted in the future.