Impact of passive haptics on task performance: of the effect of technological evolution

Since its early development in the 1990s, Virtual Reality (VR) technology, particularly head-mounted displays (HMDs), has seen significant advancements. In 1999, an empirical study demonstrated that passive haptics could significantly improve both user performance and preference in 2D tasks. In this paper, we replicate this experiment using modern VR hardware to investigate the influence of technological evolution on the relevance of passive haptics in similar scenarios. Our findings show that, for the tasks examined, performance in non-haptic conditions with current VR systems is comparable to that in haptic conditions from 1999, challenging the relevance of passive haptics for such tasks for nowadays standards. Our results imply that enhancements in visual fidelity, tracking and interaction design may have reduced the performance gap that passive haptics were previously used to address.