Short paper : Role of force-cues in path following of 3D trajectories in Virtual Reality.

Jérémy Bluteau (1, 2, 3) , Edouard Gentaz (3) , Yohan Payan (4) , Sabine Coquillart (2)

1 TIMC-IMAG - Techniques de l'Ingénierie Médicale et de la Complexité - Informatique, Mathématiques et Applications, Grenoble - UMR 5525
2 I3D - 3 dimensional interaction
3 LPNC - Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition
4 TIMC-IMAG-GMCAO - Gestes Medico-chirurgicaux Assistés par Ordinateur

This paper examines the effect of adding haptic force cues (simulated inertia, compensation of gravity) during 3D-path following in large immersive virtual reality environments. Thirty-four participants were asked to follow a 3D ring-on-wire trajectory. The experiment consisted of one pre-test/control bloc of twelve trials with no haptic feedback; followed by three randomized blocs of twelve trials, where force feedbacks differed. Two levels of inertia were proposed and one level compensating the effect of gravity (No-gravity). In all blocks, participants received a real time visual warning feedback (color change), related to their spatial performance. Contrariwise to several psychophysics studies, haptic force cues did not significantly change the task performance in terms of time completion or spatial distance error. The participants however significantly reduced the time passed in the visual warning zone in the presence of haptic cues. Taken together, these results are discussed from a psychophysics and multi-sensory integration point of view.

Mots clés: trajectory following

Domaines: Biomécanique [physics.med-ph]; Biomécanique [physics.med-ph]; Neurosciences

Jérémy Bluteau, Edouard Gentaz, Yohan Payan, Sabine Coquillart. Short paper : Role of force-cues in path following of 3D trajectories in Virtual Reality.. 15th Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments, 19th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence & 6th EuroVR (INTUITION) Conference., Dec 2009, Lyon, France. pp.9-12. ⟨hal-00483617⟩