Reach out and touch someone is a phrase, popularized by an ATT commercial in the 80’s, which means “make an emotional connection with someone”. In Virtual Reality, emotional connections are improving with the advancement of realistic avatars, eye tracking, voice chat, and now with haptics.
Haptic feedback allows VR users to physically feel virtual objects using mechanical force feedback devices that can mimic the VR atmosphere.
“From infancy, touch plays a crucial role in forging critical emotional bonds and pro-social behaviors that persist over generations… Touch pressure, frequency, body location, even absence communicates nuanced details about emotional state… Touch is a vital part of maintaining and advancing close relationships…”
-Chang & Israr
In their paper ‘Communicating Socio-Emotional Sentiment Through Haptic Messages’, Xi Laura Cang and Ali Israr show that simple haptic devices may aid in the creation and maintenance of deep human relationships in VR.
Can nuanced emotional states like attention, anger, calm, excitement, anxious, and love be conveyed via haptic feedback within VR? According to the research, participants were able to identify attention, anger, and calmness at a higher rate than hypothesized.
Future studies look expand upon these initial findings to further explore socio-emotional recognition rate.
Read the Full Paper Here
