HFX studio: haptic editor for full-body immersive experiences

Current virtual reality systems enable users to explore virtual worlds, fully embodied in avatars. This new type of immersive experience requires specific authoring tools. The traditional ones used in the movie and the video games industries were modified to support immersive visual and audio content. However, few solutions exist to edit haptic content, especially when the whole user's body is involved. To tackle this issue we propose HFX Studio, a haptic editor based on haptic perceptual models. Three models of pressure, vibration and temperature were defined to allow the spatialization of haptic effects on the user's body. These effects can be designed directly on the body (egocentric approach), or specified as objects of the scene (allocentric approach). The perceptual models are also used to describe capabilities of haptic devices. This way the created content is generic, and haptic feedback is rendered on the available devices. The concept has been implemented with the Unity®game engine, a tool already used in VR production. A qualitative pilot user study was conducted to analyze the usability of our tool with expert users. Results shows that the edition of haptic feedback is intuitive for these users.