Development of Wearable Haptic System for Tangible Studio to Experience a Virtual Heritage Alive

This paper presents a wearable haptic system to interact with virtual environment. The proposed haptic system makes a user interact intuitively with virtual environment, while the user moves freely around the environment. To make wearable system, the light-weight and compactness are emphasized during the design process. MR(magneto-rheological) brakes are adopted as actuators for the device, because a brake (passive actuator) has much larger value of a relative torque/weight ratio than a motor (active actuator). As a result a new wearable haptic system, which is folded to compact size and has large workspace, is developed. To evaluate the proposed system, tangible studio is implemented to experience a virtual heritage alive