This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.
Virtual reality (VR) can provide people with dynamic and immersive experiences—at least visually. But imagine if users also had physical objects they could interact with that correspond with the visual environment, to extend the immersive experience to physical touch.
In a recent advance, researchers describe a novel shape-shifting device, called Shiftly, which provides haptic feedback for VR users. It has an underlying origami structure that allows it to portray different curves, edges, and flat surfaces on demand, in a matter of seconds. Nearly 150 users tested Shiftly out at conference in Los Angeles, reporting that it emulates various shapes with moderate to high accuracy.
Numerous studies have suggested that haptic feedback can enhance the VR experience. But making haptics just as dynamic as the visual feedback has proved challenging.
“Users interact with many differently shaped objects in VR. Therefore, one of the main challenges for such a haptic device is to be able to approximate a wide range of very different geometries and surfaces,” says Tobias Batik, an associate researcher at the Complexity Science Hub, who began designing and testing Shiftly as part of his master’s thesis with the Virtual & Augmented Reality Group at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), in Austria.
Some dynamically shape-shifting haptic designs exist, but these tend to be fairly complex and expensive to manufacture. For example, one design relies on an array of pins, which are individually raised and lowered to create different shapes for users.
Origami’s Role in Haptic Technology
Shiftly uses a very different, age-old traditional approach that has been used to support a wide range of scientific advances: origami. The ancient art of paper folding allows people to create many different shapes—and with varying levels of stiffness—using strategically placed folds. Origami has been used extensively in robotics, infrastructure design, and cellular biology.
Inspired by the approach, Batik and his colleagues designed Shiftly so that it has three curved origami shapes arranged in a prismlike configuration, which allows the device to create flat, curved, and edged shapes. Shiftly takes between 0.25 to 4 seconds to transition between shapes. Of note, it cannot create complex shapes, such as a coffee mug, but rather more general shapes, like an edge or wave.
The researchers tested Shiflty through two different experiments with users, which they describe in a study published in the May issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
In the first experiment, blindfolded volunteers placed their hands on a 3D-printed Shiftly, while it approximated one of seven flat, curved, or edged shapes, respectively (for a total of 21 shapes). After feeling but not seeing Shiftly in a certain shape, the users were asked to look at a collection of shapes on a screen and select the one that most closely matched the one they had felt while blindfolded. The results show that Shiftly can create distinguishable feedback for different shape categories (flat, edge, convex), and that participants could also distinguish between the two configurations within each category.
In the second experiment, more than 140 users piloted Shiftly at a 2023 conference held by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH). The SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies conference was held in Los Angeles. There, as the participants looked at different objects through a VR headset, Shiftly would approximate a similar shape in the hand of each participant. Afterwards, they were asked to rate how realistic Shiftly’s simulations were on a scale of 1 (very bad) to 7 (very good).
Some shapes scored high—for example, users reported an average of 5.42 out of 7 for Shiftly’s ability to approximate a wave shape, and 5.29 for a house shape. The two objects that were most difficult to distinguish were a diamond, at 3.93, and a concave surface, at 4.4.
Yet even these latter shapes were rated moderately well. “This could indicate that Shiftly can provide plausible haptic feedback for a wide range of surface geometries,” Batik says.
The source code for the computer-aided-design and VR demo applications of a 3D-printed Shiftly are publicly available, but the researchers do not yet have plans to commercialize the tech. Instead, Batik says he sees the device as more of an early prototype for exploring new possibilities of origami and origami-inspired structures for haptic interfaces. For example, the researchers are interested in attaching Shiftly to a mobile robotic arm, enabling design architects to create a dynamic testing bed for their designs in large-scale environments.
“Such a system would enable designers and architects not only to see, but also to touch and feel spaces and objects they digitally plan and design,” says Batik. “In future work, we plan to explore this further and additionally use Shiftly as an input device, sensing the user’s touches and the pressure the user applies to the origami.”
This article appears in the July 2025 print issue.
- Graphene Paper Transforms Into Tiny Origami Robots ›
- Origami-Folded Hydrogel Paper Instantly Generates 110 Volts of Electricity ›
- Origami Robot Folds Itself Up, Does Cool Stuff, Dissolves Into Nothing ›
Michelle Hampson is a freelance writer based in Halifax. She frequently contributes to Spectrum's Journal Watch coverage, which highlights newsworthy studies published in IEEE journals.