VR prototype to make you feel spiders crawling over your mouth – uh, no thanks!

Fie Spider! The VR prototype Mouth Haptics can let you feel anything on your mouth.

There are ideas that I am immediately involved with and enthusiastic about. With others, on the other hand, I think to myself in no time at all: Thank you, but no thank you! Decisively in the last category falls the idea of ​​using haptic feedback for the mouth to be able to feel how spiders could be crawling over my face. Although I don’t have a pronounced phobia of spiders, I would still like to do without this experience. Nevertheless, the prototype, including the so-called mouth haptics, looks exciting.

Haptic feedback for the mouth? No thank you!

That’s what it’s about: So far, virtual reality headsets have usually only provided haptic feedback via a controller in the hand. But that could soon be over, as this prototype shows. The research project aims to ensure that our mouths are also part of the gaming experience. This of course opens up many possibilities.

How does this work? Vivian Shen, Craig Shultz and Chris Harrison from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University use vibrations in the air for their prototype. They can be directed very specifically to certain parts of our mouth and then generate a wide variety of tactile emotional reactions there. We’re not being touched, but it feels like it.

Scenarios simulated so far include relatively banal things like brushing your teeth, drinking or puffing on a cigarette, but also wilder to totally disgusting things. For example, testers could trudge through a virtual reality forest and feel the cobwebs on their mouths. Because that’s not disgusting enough, of course, the spiders are added (via: destructoid).

You can watch a video about it here:

link to YouTube content

Unfortunately, this video largely lacks the reactions of the people experiencing the haptic feedback for the mouth. A real reaction video with this technique would be exciting. But until then you can in this scientific publication read about the reactions.

What’s next? Should this prototype ever reach market maturity, the technology could of course be used in many ways. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the wind in your face while racing, the feeling of happiness while eating cake or much more intimate things like kissing and the like – there will definitely be people who are up for it.

How does it look for you? What do you think of the idea and what would you like to feel with it?