ThirdHand : wearing a robotic arm to experience rich force feedback

Mobile devices such as smartphones become prevalent gaming platforms. To enrich the gaming experiences, researchers are increasingly interested in bringing various haptic feedback to the mobile games. Traditional haptic devices such as phantom 1, a robotic arm that generates force on fingers in precise 6 DOF (Degree Of Freedom), can provide accurate and rich force feedback. However, since the devices need to be grounded on a fixed surface, they are not mobile. Therefore, recent research also explored haptic interaction on mobile devices with self-contain mechanisms. GyroTab [Badshah et al. 2012] demonstrated the potential of ungrounded devices using gyro effect to generate torque feedback. Muscle-propelled force feedback [Lopes and Baudisch 2013] eliminated motors and instead actuating the users muscle for creating feedback. However, these devices provide only 1-DOF force feedback, therefore limit the possible expressions and applications. Hence, this work presents ThirdHand (Figure 1), a wearable robotic arm which provide 5-DOF force feedback to enrich gaming experiences.