Haptic communication to enhance collaboration in virtual environments

International audienceMotivation – To study haptic communication in collaborative virtual environments. Research approach – An experimental study was conducted, in which 60 students were asked to perform in dyads a shared manual task after a training period. Findings/Design – The results show that haptic communication can influence the common frame of reference development in a shared manual task. Research limitations/Implications – Deeper verbalization analyses are needed to evaluate the common frame of reference development. Originality/Value – This study highlights haptic interactions importance when designing virtual environment that support shared manual tasks. Take away message – Haptic communication, combined with visual and verbal communication, enriches interactions in virtual environments

Haptic Interactions with Virtual Reality

Many possible systems exist that could benefit from Haptic Interactions, the communication of forces between a user and a system. Robotic assisted rehabilitation, interactive Virtual Reality media, and Telerobotics are some examples. However, due to simplified interactions methods, high costs, and lack of application development tools, Haptic Interaction with Virtual Reality has not reached its full potential. As a solution towards these problems, the team created a development platform Haptic Interaction System, capable of supplying Haptic Interactions between a user and hosted simulated environment and objects, along with the tools to enhance the system and develop applications based on Haptic Interactions

Standardized evaluation of haptic rendering systems

The development and evaluation of haptic rendering algorithms presents two unique challenges. Firstly, the haptic information channel is fundamentally bidirectional, so the output of a haptic environment is fundamentally dependent on user input, which is difficult to reliably reproduce. Additionally, it is difficult to compare haptic results to real-world, "gold standard" results, since such a comparison requires applying identical inputs to real and virtual objects and measuring the resulting forces, which requires hardware that is not widely available. We have addressed these challenges by building and releasing several sets of position and force information, collected by physically scanning a set of real-world objects, along with virtual models of those objects. We demonstrate novel applications of this data set for the development, debugging, optimization, evaluation, and comparison of haptic rendering algorithms

Touching the void: exploring virtual objects through a vibrotactile glove

This paper describes a simple low-cost approach to adding an element of haptic interaction within a virtual environment. Using off-the-shelf hardware and software we describe a simple setup that can be used to explore physically virtual objects in space. This setup comprises of a prototype glove with a number of vibrating actuators to provide the haptic feedback, a Kinect camera for the tracking of the user's hand and a virtual reality development environment. As proof of concept and to test the efficiency of the system as well as its potential applications, we developed a simple application where we created 4 different shapes within a virtual environment in order to try to explore them and guess their shape through touch alone

Stability of haptic display in time-delayed networked virtual environments

With the development of Distributed Virtual Environment, haptic simulation is becoming a popular research field. However, time delay issue is always an obstacle in haptic simulation because this lag over the network-based haptic display violates the stability and performance of haptic display. In the research of teleoperations, some delay prediction methods have been introduced already; however, the performance requirements have been decreased to obtain the stability reducing the total loop gain. The design of virtual coupling, an artificial link between the haptic display and virtual environment, has been introduced into haptic interaction. However, in the traditional design, virtual coupling is always coupled with the virtual environment; as a result, stability condition for the haptic simulation becomes too tight because zero order hold has the phase lag over frequency. To guarantee the stability in the presence of unpredictable time delays new control design strategies are required. In this thesis, two-port network theory is introduced to design the virtual coupling to guarantee stability of haptic display in time-delayed Distributed Virtual Environments. By decoupling the hatpic display control problem from the design of virtual environments, the use of a virtual coupling network frees the developer of haptic-enabled virtual reality models from the issues of mechanical stability. Passivity criteria in two-port networks are introduced to guarantee stability of haptic interface with a unit time delay. Furthermore, two kinds of virtual environments models--"spring" and "spring-damping" have been simulated. Steady state error and transient response for the interaction between haptic displays and above virtual environments models are investigated. This technique overcomes the influence of time delay to violate the stability of the system and reduces the human risk involved

Haptic communication to support biopsy procedures learning in virtual environments

International audienceIn interventional radiology, physicians require high haptic sensitivity and fine motor skills development because of the limited real-time visual feedback of the surgical site. The transfer of this type of surgical skill to novices is a challenging issue. This paper presents a study on the design of a biopsy procedure learning system. Our methodology, based on a task-centered design approach, aims to bring out new design rules for virtual learning environments. A new collaborative haptic training paradigm is introduced to support human-haptic interaction in a virtual environment. The interaction paradigm supports haptic communication between two distant users to teach a surgical skill. In order to evaluate this paradigm, a user experiment was conducted. Sixty volunteer medical students participated in the study to assess the influence of the teaching method on their performance in a biopsy procedure task. The results show that to transfer the skills, the combination of haptic communication with verbal and visual communications improves the novices' performance compared to conventional teaching methods. Furthermore, the results show that, depending on the teaching method, participants developed different needle insertion profiles. We conclude that our interaction paradigm facilitates expert-novice haptic communication and improves skills transfer; and new skills acquisition depends on the availability of different communication channels between experts and novices. Our findings indicate that the traditional fellowship methods in surgery should evolve to an off-patient collaborative environment that will continue to support visual and verbal communication, but also haptic communication, in order to achieve a better and more complete skills training

Haptic communication to support biopsy procedures learning in virtual environments

International audienceIn interventional radiology, physicians require high haptic sensitivity and fine motor skills development because of the limited real-time visual feedback of the surgical site. The transfer of this type of surgical skill to novices is a challenging issue. This paper presents a study on the design of a biopsy procedure learning system. Our methodology, based on a task-centered design approach, aims to bring out new design rules for virtual learning environments. A new collaborative haptic training paradigm is introduced to support human-haptic interaction in a virtual environment. The interaction paradigm supports haptic communication between two distant users to teach a surgical skill. In order to evaluate this paradigm, a user experiment was conducted. Sixty volunteer medical students participated in the study to assess the influence of the teaching method on their performance in a biopsy procedure task. The results show that to transfer the skills, the combination of haptic communication with verbal and visual communications improves the novices' performance compared to conventional teaching methods. Furthermore, the results show that, depending on the teaching method, participants developed different needle insertion profiles. We conclude that our interaction paradigm facilitates expert-novice haptic communication and improves skills transfer; and new skills acquisition depends on the availability of different communication channels between experts and novices. Our findings indicate that the traditional fellowship methods in surgery should evolve to an off-patient collaborative environment that will continue to support visual and verbal communication, but also haptic communication, in order to achieve a better and more complete skills training