"The Emotional Impact of Haptic Technology"
Project Title: TACIT
Team Members: Alex Hall, Jack Chou, Ming-fen (Jing) Chung, Michael Wong, Winnie Tsai, Yufei Chen
Faculty Advisors: Vivian Shen, Heather Kelley
The Idea
It all started with a VR monkey-climbing game that TACIT team member, Ming-fen Chung, had developed in Building Virtual Worlds. In that game, guests took on the role of a stuffed monkey climbing a wall to reach their family. The team wondered what the game would be like if users could really feel both the emotional and physical weight of the experience — what would it add if a user could really feel like they were climbing? Rather than treating haptics as a tool, they decided they wanted to explore the intersection of haptic feedback and emotional perception.
After multiple rounds of pitches and feedback from faculty and outside researchers, Team TACIT landed on a bottom-up approach — one where research and testing would determine the project’s final form. The team spent the summer reading up on haptic technology and experimenting with it in addition to learning more about VR design and diagramming possible software architecture. Before they knew it, the fall semester began and it was time to start building.
“TACIT did a wonderful job of exploring the design space of haptic gloves before committing to an experience. They playtested all sorts of haptic interactions, both on their own and paired with audiovisual scenes, and got feedback from new users every single week.”
Vivian Shen
Faculty Advisor
The Process
Rather than designing around traditional gameplay mechanics, team TACIT made haptic interaction the foundation of the experience. The team went to work developing and testing different haptic patterns with the bHaptics gloves and brainstorming possible contexts for each one. One particular pattern — that of a heartbeat — stood out as especially evocative. Not only is the heart an immediately recognizable symbol, but the speed and strength of a heartbeat is an intuitive way to communicate emotional states.
The team decided that heartbeat would be at the center of the experience. They developed a narrative in which players would assume the role of a Grim Reaper in training, guided by a companion who teaches them how to release dying souls by identifying them by their heartbeat and crushing the correct heart. The climax of the experience would be when the player crushes the heart of their companion, who turns out to be a wise soul close to their own death.
To ensure the emotional impact was communicated effectively, they designed a careful and thorough playtesting approach that included multiple ways of tracking quantitative and qualitative data. They discovered that participants consistently interpreted haptics as information about a person's physical state rather than their emotions, while visual staging and narrative supplied the emotional meaning.
What the team learned from playtesting shaped nearly every major design decision. The team responded to feedback by redesigning the tutorial so players learned heart crushing through repeated practice, separating heartbeat haptic patterns from crushing patterns to improve emotional readability, refining environmental staging and character posing, and introducing consequences after each interaction through additional haptic patterns and visual feedback.
By the end of the semester, the team had created a complete VR experience — an early example of how to apply the cognitive and emotional principles laid out by haptics researchers.
“One thing that impressed me about the team was their productive early-semester experiments exploring the legibility of certain sensations and movements and whether they were connected with specific feelings. Their software architecture and testing interface made it very easy to put the glove on people and gather responses quickly, and that put them in a great place to know what techniques worked and what didn't.”
Heather Kelley
Faculty Advisor
The Impact
- Exhibited at SONA Immersive Storytelling Festival and AWE USA 2026
- Selected for the student showcase and competition at Europe’s largest XR event, Laval Virtual
- Created detailed documentation of the development process that can be used by future designers in the space
Ultimately, Team TACIT’s final experience, titled “In The End,” was the culmination of an experimental inquiry into how vibrotactile haptics serve as a unique emotional and immersive component in storytelling. When they demoed their work at the ETC’s booth at GDC 2026, one guest described the experience as “a VR experience I’ll never forget.” Now, their work has been displayed at conferences across the United States and abroad, while their detailed documentation continues to serve as a resource for developers and researchers exploring haptics.
“I've used haptic gloves in a VR experience before, typically to simulate weapon firing or something brutally violent like that. Never, ever, would I have thought that haptics would make me feel the inextricable bonds between humanity and our emotions.”
Thomas Ortega
Founder of Remixing Reality