IEEE VR 2025 Tingling Aftereffects: Presenting Tingling Aftereffects Using Vibro-Thermal Feedback to Enhance Impact Sensation in Virtual Reality

When you hit a baseball hard, you don't just feel the moment of impact—there's a lingering tingle that follows. This paper explores how to recreate that aftereffect in VR to make impacts feel more realistic. The researchers built a VR baseball bat that delivers not just the initial hit, but also vibrotactile and thermal feedback that simulates the tingling sensation after a strong swing. In a study with 24 participants, both vibration and temperature changes as aftereffects significantly enhanced how realistic the impact felt, with high-frequency vibrotactile stimuli being particularly effective. This work shows that realism in haptic VR isn't just about the moment of contact—the sensations that linger afterward matter just as much for creating convincing physical experiences.

Hikaru Fujita, Juro Hosoi, Yuki Ban, and Shin'ichi Warisawa. 2025. Presenting Tingling Aftereffects Using Vibro-Thermal Feedback to Enhance Impact Sensation in Virtual Reality. In 2025 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), Saint Malo, France. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR59515.2025.00074