Designing multi-purpose devices to enhance users’ perception of haptics

While Virtual Reality has slowly become a common sight, haptics is still struggling to appeal to the general public. We argue that one of the possible reasons is that while VR is designed to be as easily adaptable as possible to many different contexts, haptics is often designed to fulfil a specific purpose and fails to present itself as a tool that can be exploited by designers. To test our hypothesis, we created a VR game where a wrist exoskeleton was used to interact with the environment. The game was composed of multiple levels, some of which also featured a metaphorical interaction through the same haptic device, and was tested by expert haptics scholars during a conference. Preliminary results suggest that by showing multiple potential usages of an exoskeleton, it was possible to enhance users’ interest towards the haptic device and the game.