Human actuation Ever since the conception of the virtual reality headset in 1968 many researchers have argued that the next step in virtual reality is to allow users to not only see and hear but also feel virtual worlds. One approach is to use mechanical equipment to provide haptic feedback e.g. robotic arms exoskeletons and motion platforms. However the size and the weight of such mechanical equipment tends to be proportional to its target’s size and weight i.e. providing human scale haptic feedback requires human scale equipment often restricting them to arcades and lab environments. The key idea behind this dissertation is to bypass mechanical equipment by instead leveraging human muscle power. We thus create software systems that orchestrate humans in doing such mechanical labor—this is what we call human actuation. A potential benefit of such systems is that humans are more generic flexible and versatile than machines. This brings a wide range of haptic feedback to modern virtual reality systems. We start with a…