This paper addresses the issue of improving the perception of contact that users make with purely virtual objects in virtual
environments. Because these objects have no physical component, the user's perceptual understanding of the material properties
of the object, and of the nature of the contact, is hindered, often limited solely to visual feedback. Many techniques for
providing haptic feedback to compensate for the lack of touch in virtual environments have been proposed. These systems have
increased our understanding of the nature of how humans perceive contact. However, providing effective, general-purpose haptic
feedback solutions has proven elusive. We propose a more-holistic approach, incorporating feedback to several modalities in
concert. This paper describes a prototype system we have developed for delivering vibrotactile feedback to the user. The system
provides a low-cost, distributed, portable solution for incorporating vibrotactile feedback into various types of systems.
We discuss different parameters that can be manipulated to provide different sensations, propose ways in which this feedback
can be combined with feedback of other modalities to create a better understanding of virtual contact, and describe possible
applications.
Haptic; Multimodal; Vibrotactile