PhD Position F/M Haptic stimulations for teleoperation in XR

The Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique Centre is one of Inria's eight centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Center is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc.

The candidate will integrate the Seamless team at the at the Centre Inria at Rennes University/IRISA. The Seamless team adopts a multidisciplinary approach in virtual/augmented reality (XR), human perception, human-computer interaction, and human factors, prioritizing the user at the center of the XR revolution. Their work addresses three key challenges: enabling smooth transitions between realities by bridging gaps in perception and interaction for a continuous experience; fostering equal collaboration across realities, ensuring shared awareness and uniform interaction capabilities regardless of individual differences; and advancing implicit, precise evaluation of user experience.

This PhD is part of the European Horizon Europe project OmenXR, which aims to develop a real-time, multisensory, and human-centered framework for hybrid collaboration in eXtended Reality (XR). To achieve this, OmenXR will first leverage state-of-the-art image-based rendering techniques to enable on-the-fly photorealistic visual fidelity using consumer-grade Mixed Reality (MR) hardware. Additionally, it will create a multisensory experience that anchors all collaborators in a sensory coherent environment. Finally, OmenXR will utilize real-time reconstruction and understanding to enable novel forms of hybrid collaboration, integrating remote users, teleoperated robots, and intelligent virtual agents. This PhD project will partially focus on those objectives by investigating haptic feedback for AR/VR collaboration.

Augmented Reality (AR) has been extensively investigated as a tool for remote assistance across various application domains, such as industrial maintenance and home support. In this context, a user can tele-operate a robot in a remote environment, or collaborate with remote users to perform manipulation tasks.  These tasks can have various levels of complexity, and to ensure optimal control of the manipulation, users need to feel the haptic interactions between the robot or users and the environment. Haptic interactions concern tactile information inferred from skin receptors (pressure, temperature, etc) and kinesthetic information from muscle receptors (McCloskey, 1978). In particular, the intensity and the direction of the different forces during contact with objects are important cues for manipulation. It can be simulated in AR environments using haptic interfaces, and most of the work focuses on rendering force information with grounded interfaces, fixed to the ground (e.g., (Massie, 1994); (Virtuose, 2001); (Grange, 2001), (Sato 2002), (Saint-Aubert, 2018)). While efficient, these interfaces have limited workspace and are not convenient to deploy for everyday use of AR systems. Wearable and portable versions have been investigated (e.g., (Nagai, 2015); (Barnaby, 2019); (Achberger, 2022); (Friedel, 2025); (Manson 2026)), but inherently result in cumbersome interfaces. Other work then focuses on the design of tactile interfaces (Prattichizzo,2010), stimulating the skin of the users with vibrations, thermal feedback, skin stretch, or small pressure (e.g., (Pacchierotti, 2017); (Fleck, 2025); (Marchal, 2025), (Weart, 2025)); or the design of gloves (Perret, 2018). These interfaces are generally wearable and have unlimited workspace; however, they lose their ability to render complete force feedback information, in particular the direction of forces. They also struggle to display force feedback to the whole hand, reducing their ability to simulate power-grasped interactions through tools. How to render force information while maintaining the wearability of the interfaces is still an open question.  In this context, the objective of this PhD is to investigate how tactile feedback can render force information to efficiently support remote manipulation in AR. To this end, the PhD aims to explore the design and rendering of different types of tactile stimulation in AR controllers to display forces. In addition to technical contributions, specific focus will be devoted to evaluate the influence of haptic feedback on perception, and on the manipulation ability through user experiments. 

References

Achberger, A. A. (2022). Stroe: An ungrounded string-based weight simulation device. IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), doi.

Barnaby, G. (2019). Mantis: A scalable, lightweight and accessible architecture to build multiform force feedback systems. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, doi.

Fleck, J. J. (2025). Wearable multi-sensory haptic devices. Nature Reviews Bioengineering, 288 302, doi.

Grange, S. C. (2001). Overview of the delta haptic device. Eurohaptics, doi.

Manson, J. L.-A. (2026). Anchor-based Haptics: Portable Interfaces Leveraging Real Surfaces to Display Grounded Forces for 3D Shape Simulation in VR. IEEE Virtual Reality, doi.

Marchal, M.  (2025). Virtual reality and haptics. Robotics Goes MOOC, doi.

Massie, T. H. (1994). The phantom haptic interface: A device for probing virtual objects. ASME winter annual meeting, symposium on haptic interfaces for virtual environment and teleoperator systems, (pp. 295-300), doi.

McCloskey, D. I. (1978). Kinesthetic sensibility. Physiological reviews, 763-820, doi.

Nagai, K. T. (2015). Wearable 6-DoF wrist haptic device" SPIDAR-W". SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 Haptic Media And Contents Design, (pp. 1-2), doi.

Pacchierotti, C. S. (2017). Wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand: taxonomy, review, and perspectives. IEEE transactions on haptics, 580-600, doi.

Perret, J. &. (2018). Touching virtual reality: a review of haptic gloves. International Conference on New Actuators, (pp. 1-5), doi.

Prattichizzo, D. P. (2010). Using a fingertip tactile device to substitute kinesthetic feedback in haptic interaction. EuroHaptics (pp. 125-130). Amsterdam: Springer, doi.

Saint-Aubert, J. (2018). Cable driven haptic interface for co-localized desktop VR. IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS), 351-356, doi.

Sato, M. (2002). Spidar and virtual reality. 5th biannual world automation congress, (pp. 17-23), doi.

Virtuose. (2001). https://www.haption.com/product/virtuose6d. Haption.

Weart. (2025). https://weart.it/touchdiver-pro-haptic-gloves/

The first three months of the PhD candidate will focus on a thorough analysis of the state of the art on haptic stimulations for teleoperation and XR simulations. The next twelve months will be focused on the design of tactile feedback embedded in VR controllers for simple 1D interactions, and exploration of the influence on user experience in AR scenarios. The next twelve months will be focused on more complex scenarios with 3D haptic feedback and interactions. The final six months will be focused on the writing of the manuscript and to the preparation of the defense, while finishing the initiated contributions.

Furthermore, the PhD student is also expected to participate in the different activities that will be organized around the project, project meetings, and staff exchanges.

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking (after 6 months of employment) and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training

2 300€ per month