Touch Feedback in a Head-Mounted Display Virtual Reality through a Kinesthetic Haptic Device

This paper presents the integration of a three degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) kinesthetic haptic device with a head-mounted display (HMD), using a virtual piano keyboard as a motivating application. The inertial sensors in the HMD allow the user to view the full set of keys without zooming out simply by turning his or her head to look up and down the keyboard. The haptic device further increases immersion into the virtual reality, allowing the user to reach out and touch the piano keys, feeling the dynamics of each keystroke and hearing the individual notes played. The large visual workspace afforded by the HMD exceeds the physicallylimited workspace of the haptic device, so a button clutch, workspace drift, and ballistic cursor control are each implemented as strategies to expand the reachable workspace without sacrificing tactile precision or haptic resolution.