On August 8th, 2023, the Virtual Reality Group of our Research Unit for Virtual & Augmented Reality headed by Hannes Kaufmann won the SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies Best Project Award with the project Action-Origami Inspired Haptic Devices for Virtual Reality. The award was given by the Laval Virtual jury and the project has been invited to be presented at Laval Virtual 2024.

ACM SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. SIGGRAPH 2023 is the premier conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques worldwide.

Abstract

Origami offers an innovative way to implement haptic interaction with minimum actuation, particularly in immersive encountered-type haptics and robotics. This paper presents two novel action-origami-inspired haptic devices for Virtual Reality (VR). The Zipper Flower Tube is a rigid-foldable origami structure that can provide different stiffness sensations to simulate elastic response haptic simulation in VR. The Shiftly device is a shape-shifting origami haptic display that can enable a real-time experience of different shapes of virtual objects or materials in VR. The modular approach of our action origami haptic devices provides a high-fidelity, energy-efficient and low-cost solution for interacting with virtual materials and objects in VR.

Get more info on the project here.