Development of a whack-a-mole haptic game for rehabilitation

Abstract

The main purpose of computer game is to immerse a user in a virtual environment. The perception of immersion experience has been used to develop virtual reality applications for game-based learning, healthcare, rehabilitation, etc. In traditional games, the user immersion is performed through the sense of visuals and sounds with interactions through 2D input devices like mouse and keyboards. Haptic technology can simulate tactile and kinesthetic sensations in virtual environments. Recently developed games take advantage of the haptic effects offered by some devices such as joysticks, gamepads and haptic devices. However, the main criticism of haptic-driven game development is that the real-time interactions must allow graphical updates of 30 Hz and a much higher frequency of 1 kHz for haptic feedback. This real-time interaction and feedback are very important for development of rehabilitation applications. The main goal of our research is to enable real time simulation of force feedback for rehabilitation games. This paper presents a framework for developing the virtual whack-a-mole game for rehabilitation based on haptic display. The proposed framework introduces a collision handling method to compute feedback force and provide realistic feedback through the haptic device.