Redirected Touch: Using Perceptual Hacks to Create Convincing Haptics
Redirected walking is a concept within VR that tricks a user into walking into circles, but gives them visual feedback that they’re walking in a straight line. We tend to trust our visual input over our other senses, and so redirected touch using that same principle of visual dominance in order to trick our minds into thinking it’s touching different objects while only using a single passive haptic object. It can also fool us into thinking that straight surfaces feel like curved surfaces.
Luv Kohli is one of the pioneers of redirected touch, and he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the topic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. I had a chance to catch up with Luv at the IEEE VR conference to learn more about the extent that we can warp VR spaces without our minds being able to consciously perceive it beyond having it temporarily feel weird.
Is VR on the open web going to provide a good enough experience as to be a viable distribution platform for certain VR content? That’s the big question that people have been asking for the past couple of years, and there’s been a lot of big steps towards that within the 
