VRSurus: Enhancing Interactivity and Tangibility of Puppets in Virtual Reality

We present VRSurus, a smart device designed to recognize the puppeteer's gestures and render tactile feedback to enhance the interactivity of physical puppets in virtual reality (VR). VRSurus is wireless, self-contained, and small enough to be mounted upon any physical puppets. Using machine-learning techniques, VRSurus is able to recognize three gestures: swiping, shaking and thrusting. Actuators ({em e.g.,} solenoids, servos and vibration motors) assist with the puppetry visible to the audience and provide tactile feedback on the puppeteer's forearm. As a proof of concept, we implemented a tangible serious VR game using VRSurus that aimed at inspiring children to protect the environment and demonstrated it at the ACM UIST 2015 Student Innovation Contest. Our 3D models, circuitry and the source code are publicly available at www.vrsurus.com at https://github.com/ruofeidu/ninjaterp.

Publications

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VRSurus: Enhancing Interactivity and Tangibility of Puppets in Virtual Reality

Ruofei Du and Liang He
Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA), 2016.
Keywords: Virtual Reality; Tangible User Interface; Haptics; Gesture Recognition; Head-Mounted Display

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Cited By

  • PneuFetch: Supporting Blind and Visually Impaired People to Fetch Nearby Objects Via Light Haptic Cues. Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.Liang He, Ruolin Wang, and Xuhai Xu. source | cite | search
  • Sensory VR. 1. Daniel Harley, Alexander Verni, Mackenzie Willis, Ashley Ng, Lucas Bozzo, and Ali Mazalek. source | cite | search
  • A Character in Your Hand: Puppetry to Inform Game Controls. Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Michael Nitsche and Pierce McBride. source | cite | search
  • Manipulating Puppets in VR. 2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR). Michael Nitsche and Pierce McBride. source | cite | search
  • Cinemacraft: Exploring Fidelity Cues in Collaborative Virtual World Interactions. 0. Siddharth Narayanan, Nicholas Polys, and Ivica Ico Bukvic. source | cite | search
  • Cinemacraft: Exploring Fidelity Cues in Collaborative Virtual World Interactions. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Siddharth Narayanan. source | cite | search

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