Virtual Muscle Force: Communicating Kinesthetic Forces Through Pseudo-Haptic Feedback and Muscle Input

Natural haptic feedback in virtual reality (VR) is complex and challenging, due to the intricacy of necessary stimuli and respective hardware. Pseudo-haptic feedback aims at providing haptic feedback without providing actual haptic stimuli but by using other sensory channels (e.g. visual cues) for feedback. We propose a new approach to enhance the interaction that includes kinesthetic feedback by forcing a user to tense her muscles even if no physical counterpart exists and call this pseudo-haptic interaction. We combine this additional feature with current state-of-the-art pseudo-haptic feedback. A comparison of our solution to existing approaches as well as to no kinesthetic feedback at all shows that our approach significantly increases immersion, enjoyment as well as the perceived quality of kinesthetic feedback.