Visuo-Haptic Mixed Reality for Interactive Therapy With Temperature Stimuli: A Preliminary Study

We introduce a novel Mixed Reality (MR) approach incorporating thermal feedback alongside traditional haptic and immersive visual stimuli to enhance virtual reality (VR) based interactive therapy. In this research, the system leverages the WEART TouchDIVER TM haptic glove, providing accurate tac-tile and temperature sensations at the fingertips, allowing a more intuitive and immersive MR interaction experience. The preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach was done through a visuo-thermo-haptic experiment aimed at determining how quickly and accurately users are able to categorize objects at various temperatures. The study involves 15 subjects, each performing 12 trials to grasp objects across five different tem-peratures. The results indicate that user discrimination between objects is most accurate at ambient temperature and decreases progressively when exposed to very hot, hot, very cold, and cold temperatures, respectively. The experimental findings demon-strate that incorporating thermal feedback in conjunction with visual and haptic stimuli can significantly enhance MR-based therapy techniques by providing subjects with a more realistic, immersive, and engaging experience.