Cane-walk Support Featuring Virtual Grasping Feelings in a Haptic VR Scenario

Creating virtual reality (VR) by combining visual information and pseudo-touch sensing is studied widely. However, being strictly detached from visual information, it is not easy for visually impaired individuals to sense a VR world. They are to rely on cane walk. The purpose of our study is the development of what we call haptic VR technology that can aid visually impaired individuals with sensing the surroundings in a VR space. In our scenario here we propose a method of creating a VR that involves the pseudo-haptic sensing of studded paving blocks on a pavement through the use of a virtual cane. We concern haptic-sensing process that consists of a force-feedback device located on the fingertips of a data-glove worn on the user’s hand. As a VR sensing setup, we have created two VR objects: “virtual cane” and “virtual hand” which can grasp the cane and manipulate it. The user's hand, which wears the force-feedback device, we superposed on the virtual hand. He searches for the virtual sensations on the fingers provided in the system through the cane by that it comes into contact with the studded paving blocks on the pavement. Thus, searching the pavement for the blocks by touching the virtual cane in the VR space is conveyed to the actual hand of the user via our cane-