Integrating Audio and Haptic Feedback in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

• An ongoing study is presented here. The purpose is to design and evaluate an experiment comparing an audio/haptic/visual and ahaptic/visual VR environment supporting collaborative work among sighted and blindfolded people. We want to investigate how hapticand audio functions could improve collaboration in a shared workspace. We used a 3D VR environment that supports learning of spatial geometry. The scene is a room containing objects which you can pick up and move around by means of a touch feedback pointing device called Phantom. An experiment was performed with group work in the VR environment comparing an audio/haptic/visual interface with a haptic/visual interface of the application in alaboratory. We investigate if adding audio cues improves awareness, common ground, social presence, perceivedperformance and work efficiency. The aim is also to conduct aquantitative and qualitative analysis of the video-recordedcollaboration in order to obtain information about whether and howthe added audio information changes the work process in the groups.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datorteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

HCI

Haptic

Audio

Multimodal interface

Awareness

Common ground

Computer engineering

Datorteknik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)