Abstract

Extended Reality (XR) has advanced audiovisual immersion, yet haptic feedback, especially for the lower body, remains limited. We present RoboHaptics, the first system to explore lower-body haptics using commercial quadruped robots. RoboHaptics leverages its freestanding and reconfigurable nature to deliver both active and passive tactile feedback without requiring worn devices. We contribute a design space for quadruped-mediated haptics, a software toolkit with a programmable library of tactile effects, and empirical evaluations showing that quadruped robots can deliver safe force feedback from 3–28 N (below nociceptive thresholds), reach lower-body locations with precision of 2.1–5.1 mm and accuracy of 3.7–17 mm, and support a wide range of tactile effects. A 12-participant study further revealed significant inputs into how RoboHaptics can be used to increase realism and immersion by providing lower-body haptic feedback. Together, our work establishes quadruped robots as a versatile platform for mobile, off-body haptics in XR.

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Materials

Abstract

Sustainable fabrication approaches and biomaterials are increasingly being used in HCI to fabricate interactive devices. However, the majority of the work has focused on integrating electronics. This paper takes a sustainable approach to exploring the fabrication of biochemical sensing devices. Firstly, we contribute a set of biochemical formulations for biological and environmental sensing with bio-sourced and environment-friendly substrate materials. Our formulations are based on a combination of enzymes derived from bacteria and fungi, plant extracts and commercially available chemicals to sense both liquid and gaseous analytes: glucose, lactic acid, pH levels and carbon dioxide. Our novel holographic sensing scheme allows for detecting the presence of analytes and enables quantitative estimation of the analyte levels. We present a set of application scenarios that demonstrate the versatility of our approach and discuss the sustainability aspects, its limitations, and the implications for bio-chemical systems in HCI.

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