I feel it in my fingers! Sense of agency with mid-air haptics

Recent technological advances incorporate mid- air haptic feedback, enriching sensory experience during touchless virtual interactions. We investigated how this impacts the user’s sense of agency. Sense of agency refers to the feeling of controlling external events through one’s actions and has attracted growing interest from human-computer interaction researchers. This is mainly due to the fact that the user’s experience of control over a system is of primary importance. Here we measured sense of agency during a virtual button- pressing task, where the button press caused a tone outcome to occur after intervals of different durations. We explored the effect of manipulating a) mid-air haptic feedback and b) the latency of the virtual hand’s movement with respect to the actual hand movement. Sense of agency was quantified with implicit and explicit measures. Results showed that haptic feedback increased implicit sense of agency for the longest action-outcome interval length. Results also showed that latency led to a decrease in explicit sense of agency, but that this reduction was attenuated in the presence of haptic feedback. We discuss the implications of these findings, focusing on the idea that haptic feedback can be used to protect, or even increase, users’ experiences of agency in virtual interactions.