Face/On: Multi-Modal Haptic Feedback for Head-Mounted Displays in Virtual Reality

While the real world provides humans with a huge variety of sensory stimuli, virtual worlds most of all communicate their properties by visual and auditory feedback due to the design of current head mounted displays (HMDs). Since HMDs offer sufficient contact area to integrate additional actuators, prior works utilised a limited amount of haptic actuators to integrate respective information about the virtual world. With the Face/On prototype complex feedback patterns are introduced that combine a high number of vibration motors with additional thermal sources to transport multi-modal and spatial information. A pre-study determining the boundaries of the feedbacks' intensities as well as a user study showing a significant increase of presence and enjoyment validate Face/On's approach.