Seems Like a Touch? Comparing Emotional Experience and Illusion of Touch of Visual and Haptic Presentations of Mediated Social Touch in VR

Social virtual reality (VR) applications enable users to experience highly immersive mediated interactions and social experiences. Especially embodied nonverbal communication, like mediated social touch, is mostly unique to social VR and potentially a major factor in enabling fulfilling emotional experiences at a distance. In our within-subjects study ($N = 28$), we compared feedback from wearable vibrotactile haptic devices with two established visual presentation forms of social touch: clipping and pseudo-haptics. Our findings suggest that the addition of haptic feedback can elicit significantly higher emotional arousal and result in a stronger illusion of touch than visual presentations alone. In contrast to existing literature, there was no evidence of a difference between the immersive and emotional experience of clipping and pseudo-haptics in our sample. In addition, we also investigated whether simply wearing haptic feedback devices during a social touch interaction, i.e., without active haptic feedback, affects the illusion of touch and user experience. However, there was no evidence of a significant effect in the sample studied. A free copy of this paper, including the appendix, is available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4FYKQ.