Grasping Reality: Towards Embodied Haptic Interactions that Enhance Sense of Agency in Mixed Reality

The proposed research will investigate how haptic feedback can be used to enhance the sense of agency and embodiment in virtual reality.

Sense of agency refers to the feeling of being 'in control' and embodiment refers to the feeling of being 'in' the interaction.

These are key factors in the usability of an interactive system, but have yet to be explored in virtual environments where being present in the experience is important for the interaction to succeed.

Virtual reality is also interesting with respect to sense of agency because of the potential for greater sensory incongruence between physical actions and their outcomes in the virtual world - so this becomes more of a usability problem than normal.

A greater understanding of how to foster sense of agency will lead to more responsive interaction techniques and virtual tools that enable users to feel 'in control' as they work towards their interaction goals.

This work is aligned with ongoing work in the school including work in collaboration with Logitech into the development of new input peripherals and interaction techniques for spatial computing tasks.