The feeling of presence is essential for efficient interaction within Virtual Environments (VEs). When a user is fully immersed within a VE through a large immersive display system, his/her feeling of presence can be altered because of disturbing interactions with his/her physical environment, such as collision with hardware parts of the system or loss of tracking. This alteration can be avoided by taking into account the physical features of the user as well as those of the system hardware and embedding them in the VE. Moreover, the 3D abstract representation of these physical features can also be useful for collaboration between distant users because they can make a user aware of the physical limitations of the others he/she is collaborating with. In this paper we present how we use the
In the context of scientific data analysis, we propose to compare a remote collaborative manipulation technique with a single user manipulation technique. The manipulation task consists in positioning a clipping plane in order to perform cross-sections of scientific data that show several points of interest located inside these data. For the remote collaborative manipulation, we have chosen to use the 3-hand manipulation technique proposed by Aguerreche et al. [1], which is very suitable with a remote manipulation of a plane. We ran two experiments to compare the two manipulation techniques with some participants located in two different countries. These experiments has shown that the remote collaborative manipulation technique was significantly more efficient than the single user manipulation when the 3 points of interest were far apart inside the scientific data and, consequently, when the manipulation task was more difficult and required more precision. When the 3 points of interest were close together, there was not significant difference between the two manipulation techniques.
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