SEOUL, November 03 (AJP) - People working together in virtual reality can now tell how rough an object feels to a partner even without touch-feedback equipment of their own, using a KAIST technique that turns roughness into the shape and motion of a virtual hand's outline.
In a joint sorting task, pairs finished about 23 percent faster when the roughness cues appeared on both partners' virtual hands than when no cues were shown, and they kept sorting accuracy high, the university said Tuesday.
The research came from Professor Woo Woon-tack's Ubiquitous Virtual Reality Lab at KAIST's Graduate School of Metaverse. It won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2026, an international conference on virtual and mixed reality, giving the team the award for the third year running.
When several people work in a shared virtual space, what each of them can perceive depends on the equipment they use. One person may wear a haptic device, which recreates the sense of touch by sending vibrations to the fingertips. A partner without one has to judge an object by sight alone.
Because only one side receives touch information while examining the same object, the two can struggle with tasks such as choosing or sorting items together. The researchers call this gap sensory asymmetry.
Instead of trying to recreate the same sensation on the second user's skin, the team made roughness visible. When a user touches a virtual object, the outline drawn around the virtual hand changes its shape and movement to signal one of three levels, low, medium or high.
Two preliminary experiments checked whether people could tell the visual signals apart and whether each signal matched the roughness felt through the haptic device.
The team then split 48 participants into 24 pairs, each made up of one person with a haptic device and one without, and had them sort objects together in virtual reality. The pairs worked under different conditions, with no cues, cues on one partner's hand, or cues on both.
Showing the cues on both hands produced the 23 percent time saving. When the cues appeared on their own virtual hand, participants without haptic devices also rated their confidence in their judgments and their sense of contributing to the task higher.
The team said the results show that people do not need identical touch equipment to share the information they need to make decisions together. The experiment also found that collaboration depends not only on how roughness is displayed but on whose hand displays it.
KAIST said the technology could be used in remote collaboration, virtual product evaluation, and VR education and training, where only some participants may own haptic devices. Sharing surface information visually would let others take part in assessing materials.
The work remains at the user-experiment stage. KAIST said the study has verified the interface's effect and design direction through user experiments, and that applying it in real settings will require further testing across a wider range of users, tasks, devices and work environments.
The lab's earlier wins came in 2024, for research on remote collaboration in mixed reality, and in 2025, when two of its papers on space sharing and visual-tactile experience were selected at the same time.
"Winning three years in a row is a meaningful result achieved through the government's support for training and research in virtual convergence, KAIST's research base and the convergence research of young researchers," Woo said.
He said the lab would keep combining extended reality, a term covering virtual, augmented and mixed reality, with artificial intelligence to share knowledge and experience "beyond the limits of time and space."
Baeck Min-ju, a doctoral student in KAIST's Graduate School of Culture Technology, was the paper's first author. Shin Yoon-seok, Lee Hyun-jin, Yoon Bo-ram, Yoon Sang-ho and Woo were co-authors.
The paper was accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, presented at ISMAR 2026 and named a best paper on Oct. 6.
The research was supported by the virtual convergence graduate school program of the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation.
[Reference Information]
Journal/Source: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Title: Sharing Roughness with Hand-Outline Visualization to Reduce Sensory Asymmetry in VR Collaboration
Link/DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29040
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