Virtual reality sports games today put you right on the field where you can visualize yourself swinging a tennis racket or hitting a ball with a bat with a generic controller. Imagine, though, perceiving an actual racket in your hands while you prepare to serve up an ace.
Nawafuji, the operating name of Japanese engineer Eisuke Fujinawa, has developed a solution that could allow you to use a handheld VR controller that creates the illusion of holding a real tennis racket. The controller is based on haptic shape illusion, a concept in psychology which holds that humans can perceive the shape of a wielded object without actually seeing that object, as reported in a scientific paper.
The engineering team, most of whom hail from the University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, wrote in the paper’s abstract that “Humans are capable of haptically perceiving the shape of an object by simply wielding it, even without seeing it. On the other hand, typical hand-held controllers for virtual reality (VR) applications are pre-designed for general applications, and thus not capable of providing appropriate haptic shape perception when wielding specic virtual objects.”
The idea here appears to be that humans, without looking at an object, can practically tell what that object as long as it’s in their hands.
How does this science factor into improved virtual reality experiences? The team designed a shape perception model that can be used for the creation of handhelds that, while different in size from the object they represent, provide you the illusion that you are actually holding the object that you see in the virtual reality environment. So, even if you’re not holding an actual tennis racket, the controller allows you to perceive that you are, theoretically creating a more immersive VR game.
The model works by accounting for an object’s “mass properties,” allowing a handheld to mimic the feeling of that object while being smaller, wider, or otherwise differently shaped. For example, a real tennis racket is too large to work effectively as a VR controller, so the haptic perception model can be applied to design a much smaller racket-like controller that still gives you the feeling of swinging a life-size tennis racket. You can see the model come alive at the 3:05 mark.
According to the study, the handheld controller is a little more than half the size of an actual tennis racket. Similar percentages were found for other shapes such as a sword and guitar.
Of course, with any scientific study, the shape perception model encountered its limitations on this first go-round. To account for the asymmetrical shapes of many real-life objects, the team wrote that it would have to extend the model’s parameters to account for other dimensions and a different center of mass. It would also have to update the model to accommodate for air resistance and deflection that can alter the perception of an object in virtual reality.
Nawfuji’s findings on the haptic perception model and its use in designing functional handheld VR controllers was presented at the Virtual Reality Software and Technology symposium in Sweden earlier this month.