Exploring the impact of visual-haptic registration accuracy in augmented reality

Abstract

In augmented reality (AR) systems featuring visual and haptic cues it is important to maintain a close match between the presented stimuli in order to create realistic environments. What is felt must match what is seen. However, this is a challenging task - AR systems inherently feature noise. This paper describes a study to explore the effect of disparities between visual and haptic cues in a targeting task in an AR environment. The results reveal that participants were highly sensitive to discrepancies between the modalities; performance degraded with registration errors of as low as 2 mm, suggesting this is practical limit for AR systems. Future work will explore how haptic rendering parameters such as cursor size and stiffness affect these results. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.