Supporting Collaboration in Distributed Environments by Haptic Force Feedback

The extent that haptic force feedback affects peoples ability to collaborate in a distributed way or how it affects their perception of the collaborative environment has not been investigated much. In this paper an experiment is presented where collaboration in a distributed desktop virtual environment with haptic force feedback was studied. A video analysis of the frequency of failures to lift cubes collaboratively in a haptic condition compared to a condition with no haptic force feedback was conducted. The frequency of failures to lift cubes collaboratively is in this study a measure of precision in task performance. The statistical analysis of the data shows that it is significantly more difficult to lift objects collaboratively in a three-dimensional desktop virtual environment without haptic force feedback.