Finger Tendon Vibration: Finger Movement Illusions for Immersive Virtual Object Interaction

The absence of physical information during hand-object interaction in a virtual environment diminishes realism and immersion. Kinesthetic haptic feedback has proven effective in delivering realistic object-derived haptic cues, enhancing the overall virtual reality (VR) experience. Here, we propose kinesthetic illusion through a novel application of finger tendon vibration (FTV), which creates an illusory sensation of finger movement. To effectively apply FTV for virtual object interactions, we first examine the effects of short-duration FTV (<5 s) through 3 perception studies. Based on study results, we design 6 exemplary VR scenarios, representing the overall design space of VR object interactions, and 4 different haptic rendering strategies for FTV. We evaluated these rendering methods on each VR scenario and derived a design guideline for FTV application. We then compared FTV with no vibration and simple vibration, observing that FTV enhances VR experience by providing realistic resistance on the finger, greatly improving body ownership.