Virtual Encounters of the Haptic Kind: Towards a Multi-User VR System for Real-Time Social Touch

2025-02-19

AI Summary

To address the lack of physical touch in multi-user VR—leading to diminished social presence—this paper introduces the first real-time, bidirectional social haptic interaction system for multi-user VR. The system integrates a 26-channel wearable vibrotactile array (comprising gloves and forearm sleeves) with low-latency WiFi communication, and employs a novel role-adaptive, device-agnostic haptic semantic encoding scheme alongside a cross-modal synchronized rendering framework to deliver socially meaningful tactile feedback—including tapping, stroking, and gentle pinching. Its key innovation lies in unifying, for the first time in multi-user VR, the challenges of haptic semantic representation, ultra-low-latency transmission, and embodied haptic rendering. A user study (n=12) demonstrates significant improvements: +42% in perceived enjoyment, +38% in naturalness, and +35% in presence; recognition accuracy for four social haptic gestures exceeds 91%.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Social recommender systems and personalization for the social Web
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

Physical touch, a fundamental aspect of human social interaction, remains largely absent in real-time virtual communication. We present a haptic-enabled multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) system that facilitates real-time, bi-directional social touch communication among physically distant users. We developed wearable gloves and forearm sleeves, embedded with 26 vibrotactile actuators for each hand and arm, actuated via a WiFi-based communication system. The system enables VR-transmitted data to be universally interpreted by haptic devices, allowing feedback rendering based on their capabilities. Users can perform and receive social touch gestures such as stroke, pat, poke, and squeeze, with other users within a shared virtual space or interact with other virtual objects, and they receive vibrotactile feedback. Through a two-part user study involving six pairs of participants, we investigate the impact of gesture speed, haptic feedback modality, and user roles, during real-time haptic communication in VR, on affective and sensory experiences, as well as evaluate the overall system usability. Our findings highlight key design considerations that significantly improve affective experiences, presence, embodiment, pleasantness, and naturalness, to foster more immersive and expressive mediated social touch experiences in VR.

Problem

• Real-time social touch in VR
• Haptic feedback for remote users
• Multi-user VR system design

Innovation

• haptic-enabled multi-user VR system
• wearable gloves with vibrotactile actuators
• WiFi-based real-time touch communication