< The awards ceremony on October 7. From left: Professor Dooyoung Kim, Ph.D. candidate Minju Baeck, and Professor Woontack Woo of KAIST, and Professor Bruce Thomas (award committee member) >
What if you could see how rough an object feels, even without touching it? A KAIST research team has developed a technique that makes the roughness of virtual objects visible through changes in the outline of a virtual hand. By allowing users without haptic devices to perceive roughness information visually, the technique enables more effective collaboration in virtual reality (VR) between people using different equipment.
KAIST (President Choongsik Bae) announced on October 29 that researchers from the Ubiquitous Virtual Reality Lab (UVR Lab), led by Professor Woontack Woo of the Graduate School of Metaverse, received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2026), a leading international conference on extended reality (XR). This marks the team's third consecutive year winning the Best Paper Award, following wins in 2024 and 2025.
In collaborative VR environments, users may have access to different types of sensory information depending on their equipment. For example, one person may feel an object's roughness through a haptic device that delivers vibrations to the fingertips, while a partner without such a device must rely on visual information alone. This imbalance can make it difficult for users to compare, select, or sort virtual objects together.
< Figure 1. Sensory asymmetry between collaborators in virtual reality >
To address this challenge, the research team developed a technique that encodes an object's roughness as visual cues using the outline of a virtual hand.. By modifying the outline's shape and movement, the technique represents three levels of roughness: low, medium, and high. Rather than reproducing the tactile sensation on the skin, this approach enables users without a haptic device to distinguish between roughness levels visually.
In two preliminary experiments, the team confirmed that users could distinguish between the visual cues and that the cues were consistent with roughness perceived through haptic feedback. They then conducted a collaborative VR experiment involving 48 participants organized into 24 pairs, with one participant using a haptic device and the other working without one.. Each pair collaborated to sort virtual objects according to their roughness.
< Figure 2. Hand-outline roughness visualization and the VR collaboration experiment >
When roughness cues was displayed on both participants' virtual hands, the pairs completed the sorting task approximately 23% faster than when no visual roughness cues were provided, while maintaining high sorting accuracy. Participants without haptic devices also reported greater confidence in their judgments and a stronger sense of contribution when the cues appeared on their own virtual hands.
These findings suggest that visualizing tactile information can help users make shared decisions even when only one partner has access to haptic feedback. The team also found that collaboration was influenced not only by how roughness was represented, but also by whose virtual hand displayed the information. The findings could inform the design of VR education and training programs, as well as remote collaboration environments involving users with different equipment.
The team previously received the Best Paper Award in 2024 for research on mixed reality (MR) remote collaboration. In 2025, two of its papers—one on spatial sharing and another on visual and tactile experiences—received Best Paper Awards. This year's award continues a record of achievement in XR research spanning successive cohorts of students and researchers in the lab.
< The Best Paper Award certificate and plaque >
"Receiving Best Paper Awards for three consecutive years is a meaningful achievement made possible by government support for talent development and research in virtual convergence, KAIST's research infrastructure, and the interdisciplinary efforts of our young researchers," said Professor Woo. He added that "We will continue advancing virtual convergence research that integrates XR and AI to enable people to share knowledge and experiences beyond time and space, address real-world challenges, and expand human capabilities."
This research was supported by the Virtual Convergence Graduate School Support Program, funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and administered by the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP). KAIST's Graduate School of Metaverse is dedicated to cultivating interdisciplinary talent in extended reality (XR), including virtual and augmented reality, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and spatial computing.
