Body Warping Versus Change Blindness Remapping: A Comparison of Two Approaches to Repurposing Haptic Proxies for Virtual Reality

When using tangible props as proxies for virtual objects, it is important that these haptic proxies are similar to and co-located with their virtual counterparts. This makes it challenging to scale virtual scenarios because more proxies are needed as scenarios grow more complex. Haptic retargeting, or virtual remapping, makes it possible to repurpose the same physical prop as a proxy for multiple virtual objects. This paper details a user study comparing two techniques for repurposing haptic proxies; namely haptic retargeting based on body warping and change blindness remapping. Participants performed a simple button-pressing task, and 24 virtual buttons were mapped onto four haptic proxies with varying degrees of misalignment. Body warping and change blindness remapping were used to realign the real and virtual buttons, and the results indicate that users failed to reliably detect realignment of up to 7.9 cm for body warping and up to 9.7 cm for change blindness remapping. Moreover, change blindness remapping yielded significantly higher self-reported agency, and marginally higher ownership. Taken together these results suggest that this less explored technique has potential when it comes to repurposing haptic proxies for virtual reality.