Designing haptics: Improving a virtual reality glove with respect to realism, performance, and comfort

This design paper describes the development of custom built interface between a force-replicating virtual reality (VR) haptic interface glove, and a user. The ability to convey haptic information – both kinematic and tactile – is a critical barrier in creating comprehensive simulations. Haptic interface gloves can convey haptic information, but often the haptic “signal” is diluted by sensory “noise,” miscuing the user’s brain. Our goal is to convey compelling interactions – such as grasping, squeezing, and pressing – with virtual objects by improving one such haptic interface glove, the SenseGlove, through a redesign of the user-glove interface, soft glove. The redesign revolves around three critical design factors – comfort, realism, and performance – and three critical design areas – thimble/fingertip, palm, and haptic feedback. This paper introduces the redesign method and compares the two designs with a quantitative user study. The benefit of the improved soft glove can be shown by a significant improvement of the design factors, quantified through QUESI, NASA-TLX, and comfort questionnaires.