The Effects of Encountered-Type Haptics on Immersion, Presence, User Experience, and Task Performance in Virtual Control Panel Environments

Creating lifelike perception in virtual reality environments relies on the key elements of immersion, presence, user experience, and task performance. While these factors are routinely evaluated in virtual reality studies, there is a noticeable absence of assessment based on these criteria for encountered-type haptic device systems, which are designed to offer realistic feedback in virtual reality. We present the Fast ETHD system, a high-speed encountered-type haptic device capable of moving at speeds over 1m/s, that was used to determine how device speed affects these factors in virtual environments. Participants played a Space Invaders type virtual reality game and provided feedback, showing that increasing encountered-type haptic device speed had a positive effect on sentiment scores for most aspects of the Presence and User Experience Questionnaires, as well as game performance in various categories. A virtual reality version of the ISO/TS 9241-411 multidirectional tapping task evaluated task performance for different haptic conditions, and found that encountered-type haptics resulted in a lower throughput (2.23 bps) than minimal flat haptics with a table (3.53 bps) and no haptics at all (3.70 bps), being attributed to the latency in the Fast ETHD system. These results can be used to improve future encountered-type haptic device designs for more realistic virtual reality experiences.