Evaluation of a Wearable Hand Kinesthetic Feedback System for Virtual Reality: Psychophysical and User Experience Evaluation

Abstract

Most of the wearable hand kinesthetic (force) feedback systems have only been evaluated from a physical perspective, i.e., motion measurement, force transmission, system stability, etc. However, by taking this approach, we cannot gather sufficient data to evaluate the performance of wearable kinesthetic feedback systems as haptic devices. In this paper, we evaluated the wearable hand kinesthetic feedback system developed in our laboratory from psychophysical and user experience (UX) perspectives. We designed the experiments considering the characteristics of our wearable hand system. For psychophysical evaluation, ten subjects participated in force detection, discrimination, and identification experiments. The force detection threshold of our system was better than those of the commercialized haptic systems, and discrimination threshold was similar with the human perception threshold. In the identification experiment, the subjects could distinguish the size and shape of virtual objects over 2.5 levels. For UX evaluation, 15 subjects answered a questionnaire after conducting a task using our wearable hand system in laboratory environment. The UX results verified that the subjects were satisfied with our system by giving a score of 5.87 out of 7 points. It also concluded that our system can provide a good VR experience to users by achieving over 5.5 points in ease of use, learnability, and utilitarian value.