Leveraging Change Blindness for Haptic Remapping in Virtual Environments

Passive haptic feedback provides an inexpensive and convenient approach to virtual touch. However, this approach requires that all virtual objects represented by physical props. In this paper we present change blindness haptic remapping—a novel approach that leverages change blindness to map two or more virtual objects onto a single physical prop. We describe a preliminary evaluation comparing the proposed approach to a control condition where all virtual objects where mapped to physical props. The study revealed no notable differences in terms of the participants’ experience and less than one fourth of the participants noticed the manipulation. However, the participants did perform interaction errors when exposed to haptic remapping. Based on the findings, we discuss improvements to the proposed approach and potential directions for future work.