EStatiG: Wearable Haptic Feedback with Multi-Phalanx Electrostatic Brake for Enhanced Object Perception in VR

Abstract

Haptic gloves have enabled the immersive and realistic sense of interacting with objects in virtual reality (VR) by providing coordinated haptic sensation with visual information. However, previous approaches mainly focused on providing feedback on the fingertips or distal phalanges, with minimal attention paid to the other phalanges. We propose EStatiG, a haptic glove that delivers force feedback over all finger regions from the fingertip to the proximal phalanges. Here, we enrich the perception of object shape during grasping tasks in VR. To do this, we developed the double layer and multi-stacked electrostatic clutches (ES clutches) to form an electrostatic brake (ES brake) for each phalanx. With the lightweight structure (130 grams), we enabled high-resolution force feedback while maintaining wearability and usability. We validated the user perception performance when using the proposed device. Our results showed a significant improvement in the perception of phalanx angle positions and the overall experience of realism and immersion when interacting with various object shapes in VR.