Big or Small, It’s All in Your Head: Visuo-Haptic Illusion of Size-Change Using Finger-Repositioning

Haptic perception of physical sizes enhances realism and immersion in Virtual Reality (VR). Traditional methods use pressure on fingertips or shape-changing devices, which are limited by their physical forms, restricting the simulation of objects larger or smaller than the device. Inspired by pseudo-haptics research on visual influence over haptic perception, this study developed a fixed-size VR controller that uses finger repositioning to create a visuo-haptic illusion of dynamic size changes in virtual objects. Two user studies showed that with size-changing visual context, users perceived virtual objects as 44.2% smaller to 160.4% larger than the device size, while without visuals, a constant size of 141.4% of the device size was perceived.

@inproceedings{10.1145/3613904.3642254,
  author = {Kim, Myung Jin and Ofek, Eyal and Pahud, Michel and Sinclair, Mike J and Bianchi, Andrea},
  title = {Big or Small, It’s All in Your Head: Visuo-Haptic Illusion of Size-Change Using Finger-Repositioning},
  year = {2024},
  isbn = {9798400703300},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642254},
  doi = {10.1145/3613904.3642254},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  articleno = {751},
  numpages = {15},
  keywords = {cross-modal integration, perceptual illusion, pseudo-haptics, visuo-haptic perception},
  location = {Honolulu, HI, USA},
  series = {CHI '24}
}