Haptic Fidelity Framework: Defining the Factors of Realistic Haptic Feedback for Virtual Reality

Providing haptic feedback in virtual reality to make the experience more realistic has become a strong focus of research in recent years. The resulting haptic feedback systems differ greatly in their technologies, feedback possibilities, and overall realism making it challenging to compare different systems. We propose the Haptic Fidelity Framework providing the means to describe, understand and compare haptic feedback systems. The framework locates a system in the spectrum of providing realistic or abstract haptic feedback using the Haptic Fidelity dimension. It comprises 14 criteria that either describe foundational or limiting factors. A second Versatility dimension captures the current trade-off between highly realistic but application-specific and more abstract but widely applicable feedback. To validate the framework, we compared the Haptic Fidelity score to the perceived feedback realism of evaluations from 38 papers and found a strong correlation suggesting the framework accurately describes the realism of haptic feedback.