Haptopus : Haptic VR Experience Using Suction Mechanism Embedded in Head-mounted Display

Along with the spread of VR experiences using low-cost head-mounted displays (HMDs), many proposals have been made to improve the VR experience by providing tactile information to the fingertips. However, attaching a device to fingertips has issues such as difficulty in attaching and detaching and hindering free movement of fingers. To address these issues, many methods have been proposed to incorporate a haptic presentation mechanism in an HMD, but only for presenting passive tactile information of the face or whole body. To present the tactile sensation of the fingertips in a configuration that can be incorporated in an HMD, we developed a skin-suction mechanism called Haptopus to simulate the pressure applied to multiple fingers. Haptopus can express the sense of fingers touching virtual objects by presenting corresponding suction pressure around the eyes.