The effects of tactile feedback and movement alteration on interaction and awareness with digital embodiments

Abstract

Collaborative tabletop systems can employ direct touch, where people's real arms and hands manipulate objects, or indirect input, where people are represented on the table with digital embodiments. The input type and the resulting embodiment dramatically influence tabletop interaction: in particular, the touch avoidance that naturally governs people's touching and crossing behavior with physical arms is lost with digital embodiments. One result of this loss is that people are less aware of each others' arms, and less able to coordinate actions and protect personal territories. To determine whether there are strategies that can influence group interaction on shared digital tabletops, we studied augmented digital arm embodiments that provide tactile feedback or movement alterations when people touched or crossed arms. The study showed that both augmentation types changed people's behavior (people crossed less than half as often) and also changed their perception (people felt more aware of the other person's arm, and felt more awkward when touching). This work shows how groupware designers can influence people's interaction, awareness, and coordination abilities when physical constraints are absent.

A survey on haptic technologies for mobile augmented reality

“…The extensive experiments demonstrate that LHT improves the quality of the tactile rendering over SHO and SHT. Doucette et al [57] study group interaction on digital tabletops when there is tactile feedback to people crossing their arms so as to avoid touching other people's arms. People are more aware of the management of shared public space because they try to avoid touching other people's arms.…”

Bodies in motion

“…By designing tools that provide users with timely infor mation about the task at hand, such as who is present, where they are working, and what they are doing, these systems trans late the affordances found in physically shared workspaces into online tools that support group work [8,14,18,20]. For exam ple, by using digital representations of user arms to create a sense of where they are active in a virtual workspace [12], pro viding historical logs of past exchanges [13], and preserving spatial relationships [36], these systems facilitate coordination between users and improve group efficiency. In these ex amples, indicators of collaborator presence are implemented as representations of information, such as positioning and availability, that users would have access to in a non-virtual workspace.…”