Wormholes in VR: Teleporting Hands for Flexible Passive Haptics

Presenting haptic feedback in virtual reality (VR) is a long-standing challenge, with passive haptics being one way of presenting haptic feedback inexpensively. However, passive haptics requires props in physical environments that are co-located with their virtual counterparts, which is often not the case in the real world. Although redirected hands and other methods have previously been proposed to solve this problem, significant differences between the displayed and actual hand positions can cause the degradation of presence and sense of embodiment, limiting the range of presentable environments. In this study, we present a new hand displacement method called wormholes, in which the virtual hand is teleported discontinuously as the user inserts their hand into the hole. The experiment showed that the wormhole could maintain the sense of embodiment, presence, and task performance even with large hand displacements. Our method enables to apply passive haptics even when the actual and virtual environments are quite different, contributing to the realization of inexpensive and flexible haptic presentation in VR applications.