HairTouch Lets You Feel Your Virtual Reality Pet's Fur

The ultimate goal of virtual reality (VR) is to provide a completely immersive experience. When you pull on your headset, you want to feel like you inhabit a virtual world. Today's VR headsets do a great job of immersing us with detailed visuals and accurate sound. But that all falls apart as soon as you try to touch something in the virtual world, like a fluffy cat. You can't actually feel that cat's fur and that immediately reminds you that everything you see is fake. To give VR users the ability to feel that cat's fur, a team of researchers developed a unique VR controller called HairTouch.

While HairTouch is the result of a great deal of hard work and sophisticated technology, it is doubtful that it will ever reach the consumer market. It is hard to even take the device seriously. That's because it only does one thing: let VR users feel virtual fur or fibers. It isn't capable of producing any other textures — just fur. And users can only touch that fur with their index finger on the hand in which they're holding the controller. But HairTouch does alter the stiffness, roughness, and length of the hair in response to the virtual environment. That means that a Persian cat will feel different than a short-haired tabby.

The HairTouch device attaches to a standard VR controller and contains all of the mechanisms necessary to adjust the brush hairs that represent fur. Those brush hairs, which are similar to the bristles you'd find on a paintbrush, connect to a series of a servo motors. HairTouch has two sets of brush hairs and their heights are independently adjustable. Servo motors can also adjust the angle of the hairs, perpendicularly to the user's finger, to differentiate between flat-lying hair and hair that is standing up. An Arduino Mega board controls those servo motors in response to commands coming from a connected computer. HairTouch won't make it to market, but this research is important to the ongoing goal of providing a VR experience that is immersive to more than just our eyes.