Tacit Uses Haptics to Elicit Intended Emotion
Wearing haptic gloves and a VR headset, a player steps into an afterlife as Death themself. Frozen figures stand in front of them. To move forward to the next scene, they must reach out with their hands to feel the vitality and emotional weight of the characters’ hearts and decide whose life to take.
That is the core of Tacit, a semester-long ETC project that explores a simple but ambitious question: how can virtual reality and haptic gloves work together to create profound emotional experiences?
The six-person team, led by producer Winnie Tsai, built Tacit around touch. “Tacit is a project using VR and haptic gloves, and we try to do exploration on how haptic gloves with VR context, like audio and visual, can create profound emotional experiences,” Tsai said during an interview.
Haptics, the technology of simulated touch, often shows up in gaming as vibration feedback. Most VR applications rely on handheld controllers. Gloves are less common, and when they do appear, they are typically used for first-person shooter (FPS) mechanics or technical simulations. The Tacit team intentionally moved in a different direction.
“In VR, one of the most powerful advantages is that people can interact with objects using bare hands, and that matches with human instinct,” programmer Jing Chung explained. For Tacit, the team wanted something more intuitive. “Building upon that instinct, haptic gloves offer us the chance to mimic touch sensation. Most applications use this technology to simulate real-world tactile feedback, but we see potential here. It doesn’t have to be ‘real’. Beyond simulation, it has the potential to become the very motor driving emotional reaction.”
Instead of designing a traditional video game, the team built a narrative experience with a defined beginning and end. Players assume the role of Death and move through a three-act structure. They reach into characters to interpret heartbeats and make decisions that shape the emotional arc.
“We technically don't really say video game,” Tsai said. “This is a from start to end experience where it's a narrative experience with a storyline that you go through.”
The project unfolded in two phases. In the first half of the semester, the team focused on experimentation, isolating how haptics interacted with sound and visuals. In the second half, they applied what they learned and built a complete experience.
Playtesting played a central role. The team conducted multiple rounds of testing to track how players responded to key moments. Their goal was precise. “Our goal was to make sure that each moment where haptics is important would elicit our intended emotion,” Tsai said.
The intended emotions were helplessness, sadness, and a bittersweet feeling. Over time, the feedback aligned. “All of the play testers, including people who are familiar with games, VR, or people who have not played games, are VR naive guests, all said that they felt the weight of making the decisions, which was what we wanted,” Tsai said. “And most importantly, they said that haptics from the gloves were essential to the experience, which was our main qualifier for the project.”
The gloves did more than reinforce narrative beats. They changed how people behaved in VR. “Using hands instead of controllers is very open-ended and a lot of people try to do a lot more different gestures with their hands than just a button press,” 3D artist Alex Hall said. “There’s almost every single time we tested, there’s always a curve ball, somebody doing something completely different than we expected.”
That unpredictability forced the team to rethink interaction design, refine mechanics, and account for spontaneous gestures that don't occur when players press buttons.
Now that the semester project has wrapped, Tacit is moving beyond the classroom. The team is submitting the experience to conferences and festivals. At the same time, they are expanding the narrative rather than starting from scratch. “Instead of doing a different storyline, we're actually planning on expanding our current story,” Tsai said. Additional scenes will help refine pacing and deepen the emotional build.
Tacit positions touch as more than a technical layer. In this afterlife, emotion travels through the hands. By pairing immersive visuals with carefully designed haptic patterns, the ETC team demonstrates that VR can deliver not only spectacle but also sorrow.
A multidisciplinary ETC team created tacit: Alex Hall (Environmental Artist), Jack Chou (Gameplay Programmer), Jing Chung (Software Architect, Technical Artist), Michael Wong (Narrative Design, Sound Design, Composer, Rigging Artist), Winnie Tsai (Producer, UX Research, Voice Actor), and Yufei Chen (Character Art).
Tacit was developed under the advisement of professors Heather Kelley and Vivian Shen.