Virtual Encounters of the Haptic Kind: Towards a Multi-User VR System for Real-Time Social Touch

TL;DR

This work tackles the lack of real-time social touch in virtual reality by introducing a device-agnostic, multi-user VR system that transmits and renders social touch through wearable vibrotactile gloves and forearm sleeves. Implemented on Meta Quest with Unity and Photon Fusion, the system supports up to $16$ users and uses a 52-ERM, WiFi-based haptic network to deliver real-time feedback encoded via collision depth information. A two-part user study with 12 participants examines how gesture speed, feedback modality, and user roles affect affective experience, embodiment, presence, and usability, revealing that slower gestures and multimodal (visual+haptic) feedback yield the most positive and natural responses, while haptic feedback substantially enhances embodiment and presence. The findings offer design guidelines for immersive mediated social touch in VR and underscore the potential for device-agnostic, open-source platforms to benchmark and compare haptic devices in shared virtual spaces, with implications for social bonding and remote interaction. The work also identifies limitations, including vibrotactile fidelity and the scope of actuated body areas, guiding future expansion to full-body haptics and integration with commercial devices.

Abstract

Physical touch, a fundamental aspect of human social interaction, remains largely absent in real-time virtual communication. We present a haptic-enabled multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) system that facilitates real-time, bi-directional social touch communication among physically distant users. We developed wearable gloves and forearm sleeves, embedded with 26 vibrotactile actuators for each hand and arm, actuated via a WiFi-based communication system. The system enables VR-transmitted data to be universally interpreted by haptic devices, allowing feedback rendering based on their capabilities. Users can perform and receive social touch gestures such as stroke, pat, poke, and squeeze, with other users within a shared virtual space or interact with other virtual objects, and they receive vibrotactile feedback. Through a two-part user study involving six pairs of participants, we investigate the impact of gesture speed, haptic feedback modality, and user roles, during real-time haptic communication in VR, on affective and sensory experiences, as well as evaluate the overall system usability. Our findings highlight key design considerations that significantly improve affective experiences, presence, embodiment, pleasantness, and naturalness, to foster more immersive and expressive mediated social touch experiences in VR.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: (A) Glove and sleeve with 26 ERMs, (B) Control unit consisting of 2 stacked PWM shields, an Arduino Uno R4 WiFI, and an integrated power bank, (C) Spatial arrangement of actuators across the hand and forearm when the glove and sleeve are worn
• Figure 2: Visualization of the VR environment interactions and collision dynamics
• Figure 3: Interactable virtual objects and 2D Valence-Arousal Emojigrid toet2019emojigrid
• Figure 4: Prescribed Touch Experiment: Ratings of both toucher and touchee across different speeds, user modes, and feedback conditions for each gesture performed
• Figure 5: Recorded gesture speed performed by Toucher, categorized into the three prescribed speed levels