Playing with tangibles in Virtual Reality

This talk presents how tangible objects could be used in Virtual Reality to enhance the user's perception and immersion. In Virtual Reality, the user wearing a Head Mounted Display is generally unable to see directly the tangible objects and ends up confronting the virtual objects he sees to the tangible ones he can feel. This situation often leads to breaks of immersion, thus degrading the user's experience in virtual environments. This talk presents some of our last contributions to handle the use of tangible objects for improving our 3D interaction with virtual worlds. The talk will illustrate first how and to what extent a discrepancy between the tangible objects and the virtual objects can be introduced without breaking the user's immersion through different algorithmic strategies. In a second part, the talk will present how we could improve the registration between the tangible and the virtual objects using new technological solutions combined with appropriate 3D interaction techniques. At the end, the talk aims at introducing some of the next challenges in Virtual Reality for handling haptic feedback through the use of tangible objects.