Enhancing immersive visual-audio VR environments with tactile haptic actuators

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This NSERC Engage is the first collaboration between the Principal Investigator, David Wang, and Tactile Audio Displays (TAD) Inc. This work will study the impact on user impairment in fully immersive virtual reality (VR) environments with respect to the increasing realism of the virtual reality experience. The modalities to be studied will include a variety of immersive video technologies, 3-D binaural audio and the TAD Haptic Displays, which translates sounds into tactile sensations which are transmitted to the user via a set with embedded tactile-acoustic actuators. The results of this study are applicable to both gaming and training applications. TAD is a company that has developed innovative haptic technologies and is working with university research teams to evaluate the efficacy of their technology as well as to study new applications. David Wang and his research team at the University of Waterloo have conducted research in the areas of haptics, tele-haptics, 3D binaural audio as well as applications such as surgical haptic simulators. The focus of this work is on incorporating work on a fully developed simulator to examine motion sickness and whether it is increased or decreased by tactile stimulation. This will build the groundwork for future directions of hapto-visual-audio VR Environments.