Dual-Modal Haptic Interaction in VR to Support Window Purchasing Decisions

Related Publication: Dual-Modal Haptic Interaction in VR to Support Window Purchasing Decisions

Full Paper

This blog post describes research presented at the 23rd EuroXR International Conference (EuroXR 2026) in Valencia, Spain, where it received the Best Scientific Paper Award. Co-authored with Sarah Frémann, Lieve Doucé, Stephanie van de Sanden, Kim Willems, Davy Vanacken, and Gustavo Rovelo Ruiz.

What We Did

Online shopping works well for products you can judge by looking at them. It works much less well for products whose value lies in how they feel. Windows are a good example: when building or renovating a home, two of the things that matter most for daily comfort and energy costs are how easily a window slides open and how well it insulates. Neither of those comes across in a photo or a spec sheet.

The obvious solution is to let people try physical samples, but that quickly runs into practical limits: showrooms only have so much space, and manufacturers can only build and ship so many demo units. So we asked: can Virtual Reality (VR) and haptic feedback let people perceive these physical properties without a physical sample?

To explore this, we built Hapti-Window, a dual-modal haptic system for evaluating sliding windows. It combines two kinds of touch feedback:

• Force feedback, which simulates the resistance you feel when sliding different window mechanisms open.
• Thermal feedback, which conveys differences in insulation quality, letting you feel the difference between better and worse insulating glazing.

How We Did It

We ran a study with 159 participants who evaluated windows under different conditions. We compared two ways of presenting the product:

1. Video, the kind of media you would typically find on a product website.
2. VR, where participants could see the window in an immersive environment.

And we compared whether participants received haptic feedback or not. This let us separate the effect of immersive visuals from the effect of touch, and see how they work together.

We measured participants’ sense of presence (how much they felt they were really there with the product), where they directed their visual attention, and how well they felt they could evaluate the product.

Results

VR increases presence

Unsurprisingly, but importantly, VR significantly increased presence compared to video. Seeing the window in an immersive environment makes people feel more like they are actually standing in front of it.

Haptics add to that, regardless of the medium

Haptic feedback increased presence even further. It also influenced how people evaluated the product in two different ways:

• Modality-specific effect on attention: haptic feedback redirected participants’ visual attention, and how it did so depended on the type of feedback (force or thermal). What people feel changes what they look at.
• Modality-general effect on evaluation: haptic feedback improved how well participants felt they could evaluate the product, and this held regardless of which type of haptic feedback they received.

You don’t necessarily need full VR

Perhaps the most practical finding is that adding haptics to conventional product media like video can meaningfully support consumer evaluation, even without immersive VR. For retailers and manufacturers, this is good news: a VR setup is not a prerequisite for letting customers “feel” a product.

Why It Matters

Our results show that even relatively simple haptic implementations can improve the user experience of product evaluation, both in VR and in regular video-based product visualization. That lowers the bar for adoption: you don’t need a perfect, high-fidelity simulation of every physical property to help consumers make better-informed choices.

For the design of immersive e-commerce systems, this suggests thinking of haptics not as an add-on to VR, but as a sensory channel in its own right, one that can be combined with whatever visual medium fits the context, whether that is a VR headset in a showroom or a video on a product page.

Conclusion

Key Takeaways:

1. VR increases the sense of presence compared to video when evaluating products.
2. Haptic feedback further increases presence, redirects visual attention depending on the type of feedback, and improves people’s perceived ability to evaluate it.
3. Haptics can support product evaluation even when combined with plain video, without full VR.
4. Simple haptic setups can already make a difference, which makes them a practical option for e-commerce.

This blog post is based on research presented at EuroXR 2026. For complete details, see the full paper.