XR Haptics, Implementation & Design Guidelines

This book is intended to orient implementers, designers, product, and program managers working in extended reality application areas who are considering adding haptic feedback technologies to their new or existing projects. It collects several decades of combined experience in this specific area by members of the Haptics Industry Forum, along with tips and suggestions from world leaders in haptics.

Incorporating haptic feedback into an extended reality (XR) project can dramatically impact the user’s sense of presence and agency, which increases training value and engagement with the XR experience. The key challenge that many developers encounter when incorporating haptics is the immaturity of tooling, lack of a universal SDK, and critical design, implementation, and playback differences from audio and visual experience components. This may seem daunting, but with the correct perspective and expectations, haptics can generate real value-add without derailing project timelines or budgets. This book aims to provide a practical guide for achieving the promise of haptics in XR projects.

First and foremost, this book is a pragmatic guide designed to enable real-world outcomes. It includes a step-by-step guide for implementers to approach the implementation of haptics in their scenario in a controlled way with clear milestones, deliverables, and risks along the way. Even if the process suggested by this book is not strictly followed, the basic guidelines provided about haptic development may be utilized throughout the implementation process to achieve a more successful outcome.

The approach outlined in this book aims to provide a global taxonomy of the so-called “Haptics-Interaction problem” in extended reality. Implementers tasked with developing and integrating haptics into an XR project will find the section-by-section guide for the haptics-specific implementation, along with decisions, deliverables, and risks for each step. Implementers should start with the workflow proposed in Part 1 and dive into the details of each step in Chapters 4 through 12.

In Part 2, Product and Program managers will find XR use cases in which haptics are known to provide meaningful value. A selection of real-world case studies is presented in Chapters 13 and 14.

Tips from world-class haptics experts are inserted throughout the book. These serve to guide the reader with concise rules of thumb that were learned from years of experience developing haptic technology. The effort has been made to illustrate essential concepts with diagrams and references to external resources.