UnrealHaptics: Plugins for Advanced VR Interactions in Modern Game Engines

• Main Authors: Janis Rosskamp, Hermann Meißenhelter, Rene Weller, Marc O. Rüdel, Johannes Ganser, Gabriel Zachmann
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-04-01
• Series: Frontiers in Virtual Reality
• Subjects: virtual reality; unreal engine; haptic feedback; grasping; plugin architecture; contact point
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2021.640470/full

We present UnrealHaptics, a plugin-architecture that enables advanced virtual reality (VR) interactions, such as haptics or grasping in modern game engines. The core is a combination of a state-of-the-art collision detection library with support for very fast and stable force and torque computations and a general device plugin for communication with different input/output hardware devices, such as haptic devices or Cybergloves. Our modular and lightweight architecture makes it easy for other researchers to adapt our plugins to their requirements. We prove the versatility of our plugin architecture by providing two use cases implemented in the Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). In the first use case, we have tested our plugin with a haptic device in different test scenes. For the second use case, we show a virtual hand grasping an object with precise collision detection and handling multiple contacts. We have evaluated the performance in our use cases. The results show that our plugin easily meets the requirements of stable force rendering at 1 kHz for haptic rendering even in highly non-convex scenes, and it can handle the complex contact scenarios of virtual grasping.