Can We Create Better Haptic Illusions by Reducing Body Information?

In this paper, we propose a method of alleviating a sense of unnaturalness and individual differences in pseudo-haptic experience in VR. The method is to use a non-isomorphic manipulation of a virtual body, where the actual and virtual body movement is decoupled. As an evaluation of this approach, two manipulation methods are compared in the task of pulling a virtual object in VR. In the first one, the user physically performs a pulling gesture, and in the second one, the user pulls with a controller's analog stick (Fig. 1). A temporal delay is added to the virtual object's motion for the pseudo-haptic effect. The results suggest a tendency where the individual differences in pseudo-haptic experience and unnaturalness were smaller with the analog stick manipulation, even with intensive pseudo-haptic expressions.