Weight in VR

In Virtual Reality, it is seemingly accepted that objects appear weightless when interacted with.

Designers will develop the VR experience around this, like Job Simulator only providing small, light objects to pick up, or Fantastic Contraption making the entire world out of air-balloons to give an ‘explanation’ for the lack of mass in the objects.

We think that weight is an enormously important factor to get a sense of physicality, establishing a true ‘virtual reality’.

We also think that haptic feedback isn’t absolutely necessary to provide this feeling, as visual stimulus is a big factor in establishing physicality.

Projects like the rubber hand illusion prove this fact as well.

This project draws inspiration from Koert Van Mensvoort‘s work on “What You See Is What You Feel“: ‘Exploiting the dominance of the visual over the haptic domain to simulate force-feedback with cursor displacements’, and its practical application “PowerCursor“, where the graphical representation of the cursor is decoupled from the actual position of the cursor, where on-screen objects influence the behaviour of the cursor’s movement, simulating friction, mass, pressure and other physical influences.

That’s why we propose a project where we simulate weight in Virtual Reality by disconnecting the avatar from the direct control of the VR motion controllers.

Research topics

Feedback of decoupling, user experience of physical influence, etc. [w.i.p.]

Potential use-cases

[w.i.p.]

Prototypes