Trial Development of Immersive Virtual Reality Supporting Content for Training Engineers Using Oculus Rift and Leap Motion

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px 'Times New Roman'} In Japan, accidents in the factory are constantly becoming serious problems as a result of lack of technology transfer due to mass retirement of skilled technicians in machine tools. As a solution, this study proposes immersive VR content for work support using Head Mounted Display (HMD) and haptic device. This is a system to reproduce machine tools with dangerous handling such as milling machines and lathes in the VR space and present arbitrary feedback to the fingertips with a haptic device when performing erroneous work or fine work, thereby safely carrying out work training support. In this study, HMD and haptic device were used in combination as a method to feedback to users, so that more realistic work can be done in virtual space. VR environment was created with Unity that can manipulate machines in Virtual Space. Leap Motion was used to track and display subjects own hand in VR environment. Haptic device was made using Arduino and vibration motor to present feedback on fingertips. As a result, the tracking of the hand using Leap Motion when gloves are used together shows that the detection rate greatly differs depending on the material of the glove. With VR environment and vibration feedback, we showed the effectiveness of intuitive operation similar to reality.