Designing Haptics: Comparing Two Virtual Reality Gloves with Respect to Realism, Performance and Comfort

This paper describes the development of custom built interface between a force-replicating Virtual Reality (VR) haptic glove, and a user. The ability to convey haptic information - both kinesthetic 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 users brain. Our goal is to convey compelling interactions with virtual objects, such as grasping, squeezing, and pressing by improving one such haptic interface glove - the Sense Glove - 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.