Influence of Haptic Communication on a Shared Manual Task in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

Amine Chellali (1) , Cédric Dumas (1, 2) , Isabelle Milleville-Pennel (1)

1 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes
2 Mines Nantes - Mines Nantes

With the advent of new haptic feedback devices, researchers are giving serious consideration to the incorporation of haptic communication in collaborative virtual environments. For instance, haptic interactions based tools can be used for medical and related education whereby students can train in minimal invasive surgery using virtual reality before approaching human subjects. To design virtual environments that support haptic communication, a deeper understanding of humans' haptic interactions is required. In this paper, human's haptic collaboration is investigated. A collaborative virtual environment was designed to support performing a shared manual task. To evaluate this system, 60 medical students participated to an experimental study. Participants were asked to perform in dyads a needle insertion task after a training period. Results show that compared to conventional training methods, a visual-haptic training improves user's collaborative performance. In addition, we found that haptic interaction influences the partners' verbal communication when sharing haptic information. This indicates that the haptic communication training changes the nature of the users' mental representations. Finally, we found that haptic interactions increased the sense of copresence in the virtual environment: haptic communication facilitates users' collaboration in a shared manual task within a shared virtual environment. Design implications for including haptic communication in virtual environments are outlined.

Mots clés: Haptic communication; Common ground; Collaborative virtual environments; User-centred design; HCI

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Amine Chellali, Cédric Dumas, Isabelle Milleville-Pennel. Influence of Haptic Communication on a Shared Manual Task in a Collaborative Virtual Environment. Interacting with Computers, 2011, 23 (4), pp.317-328. ⟨10.1016/j.intcom.2011.05.002⟩. ⟨hal-00595492⟩