Pneumatic and acoustic suit: multimodal haptic suit for enhanced virtual reality simulation

A haptic device provides users with physical feedback to enhance their experience in virtual reality (VR). We developed a multimodal haptic suit, called as Pneumatic and Acoustic (PA) suit, which exhibits high-resolution haptic feedback, and applies high pressure and realistic vibration to a user. The PA suit artificially simulates the sensation of brief and strong collisions such as the impact of an explosion, ball, or fist. The pneumatic actuators, consisting of 40 air bladders, are designed as bellows-type pneumatic devices for vertical inflation. The air bladders are placed on the chest at an equal interval distance of 30 mm for high-resolution feedback. The acoustic actuators use an effective sound signal of a collision similar to realistic vibrations. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of our multimodal haptic suit in improving VR experience of users. The recognition tests clearly show that participants distinguish between the haptic patterns and position of collided virtual objects with the suit. The user study involving a collision of a ball shows that the PA suit transmits the approximate pressure of a real ball collision with artificial haptic feedback. Our receiving ball and explosion VR simulations confirm that the PA suit improves a VR experience depending on the types of actuators and VR contents. The results prove that the PA suit creates distinguishable haptic patterns for guiding a task and improves the VR experience of users with powerful and multimodal haptic feedback hence providing high-quality VR simulation.