A virtual environment with haptic feedback for better distance estimation

This demonstration will show how a small number of wearable tactors can improve the suitability of a multimodal system for engineering design. It is well reported in the scientific literature that depth perception in virtual reality is inaccurate, yet users of VR need a high-fidelity experience in several applications, including engineering, in this case so that decisions are made based on the true design intent. The tactors' vibration in this demonstration is reconfigurable to create various vibration effects, for example: frequency value ranging from 261.0 to 523.0Hz, delay (from 3830 to 1920 microseconds) and repeat effects. The avatar can be rescaled so that decision makers can experience the design from the perspective of different percentile users. We developed an integrated full-body and finger kinematics based on a combination of Microsoft Kinect and Leap Motion (LM). We explored the collider system and examined Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) and skin mesh-based colliders. We demonstrate the ways in which low-cost technologies can be appropriated to develop a wearable and usable system that offers improvements to engineering design.