Emotional

VR Controller

Physical touch is one of the most important channels of interpersonal communication, but we barely notice the haptic clues in our daily lives. The study of robot-human affective interaction has primarily focused on facial expressions and vocal interactions, but not touch.

• What if the robots being developed today and in the future had the ability to express their emotions to humans through physical contact?

• Could it be possible for humans to understand robots’ emotions through haptic interactions?

Hextouch is an experiment project to explore robot’s emotional expression through touch. We chose Virtual Reality as a way to demonstrate because immersive game and controller can be well related in Virtual Reality so that we can better test people’s reaction to robot’s touch expressions.

My Contribution

As a Unity Developer, I am responsible for developing the VR game. This includes VR player movement in VR, hardware inputs from Arduino and all the interactions in game.

This small game experience includes 5 main interactive place in the scene. Players start from the portal at the center point and summon the little robot on their arm. They can explore the virtual world with the robot which provides light like an electric torch. When approaching different places, the robot expresses different emotions through touch feedback, as well as animations in the game. In the end, players enlighten the entire valley and see off the robot to the portal.

Publication

Ran Zhou, Yanzhe Wu and Harpreet Sareen. 2020. HexTouch: A Wearable Haptic Robot for Complementary Interactions to Companion Agents in Virtual Reality. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Emerging Technologies (SA ’20)

Ran Zhou, Yanzhe Wu and Harpreet Sareen. 2020. HexTouch: Affective Robot Touch for Complementary Interactions to Companion Agents in Virtual Reality. In 26th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST '20) Best Demo Award