We all think about Virtual Reality mostly in terms of visual immersion: realistic or imaginary worlds we are free to explore and see through advanced visors and tracking systems.
Yet when we “interact” in the real world, other senses are involved: grasping an object, shaking hands with other people, using hand tools and keyboards are all tasks based on the sense of touch.
In SUN, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna is developing novel wearable haptic interfaces to provide sense of touch in virtual and augmented reality: the challenge and the objective of the novel technologies is to develop compact and highly wearable actuated devices, not limiting comfort, wide workspace and agility allowed by modern VR systems.
At the same time, the rich and informative haptic feedback will be applied in SUN for augmented reality: here augmented information related to task execution and other environmental metrics will be provided through the sense of touch, aiding the user with more intuitive and immediate feedback.