Investigating the Detection of Bimanual Haptic Retargeting in Virtual Reality

Haptic retargeting is a virtual reality (VR) interaction technique enabling virtual objects to be ”remapped” to different haptic proxies by offsetting the user’s virtual hand from their physical hand. While researchers have investigated single-hand retargeting, the effects of bimanual interaction in the context of haptic retargeting have been less explored. In this study, we present an evaluation of perceptual detection rates for bimanual haptic retargeting in VR. We tested 64 combinations of simultaneous left- and right-hand retargeting ranging from − 24° to + 24° offsets and found that bimanual retargeting can be more noticeable to users when the hands are redirected in different directions as opposed to the same direction.