@inproceedings{villa2022cobity,
	title = {Cobity: A Plug-And-Play Toolbox to Deliver Haptics in Virtual Reality},
	author = {Steeven Villa and Sven Mayer},
	year = {2022},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of Mensch Und Computer 2022},
	publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
	address = {Darmstadt, Germany},
	series = {MuC'22},
	doi = {10.1145/3543758.3543775},
	url = {https://sven-mayer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/villa2022cobity.pdf},
	date = {2022-01-01},
	abstract = {Haptics increase the presence in virtual reality applications. However, providing room-scale haptics is an open challenge. Cobots (robotic systems that are safe for human use) are a promising approach, requiring in-depth engineering skills. Control is done on a low abstraction level and requires complex procedures and implementations. In contrast, 3D tools such as Unity allow to quickly prototype a wide range of environments for which cobots could deliver haptic feedback. To overcome this disconnect, we present Cobity, an open-source plug-and-play solution to control the cobot using the virtual environment, enabling fast prototyping of a wide range of haptic experiences. We present a Unity plugin that allows controlling the cobot using the end-effector's target pose (cartesian position and angles); the values are then converted into velocities and streamed to the cobot inverse kinematic solver using a specially designed C++ library. Our results show that Cobity enables rapid prototyping with high precision for haptics. We argue that Cobity simplifies the creation of a wide range of haptic feedback applications enabling designers and researchers in human-computer interaction without robotics experience to quickly prototype virtual reality experiences with haptic sensations. We highlight this potential by presenting four different show cases.},
	keywords = {avatars, empathy, Social Perception, Virtual Characters}
}