Designing Knowledge Sharing Interfaces with Improved Interaction: Haptics and Web3D

Abstract

As human beings, from an early age, learning and discovery are enabled by senses: visually exploring the 3D world around, holding and touching objects or listening to others and asking questions. In a traditional education environment, training setup or collaborative work, the majority of the interaction modalities and written materials are still designed for a 2D visual space (e.g., books, course web pages, articles, videos, and images). With the rapid advances in technology, new interaction modalities become widely available and have the potential to improve, and often revolutionize the way we interact, learn and cooperate with each other. The chapter explores new interaction paradigms and systems enabling the shift from a 2D visual space to 3D user interfaces, as well as the addition of a new interaction modality, the tactile or touch modality, through haptic user interfaces. The International Standards Organization’s extended 3D (X3D) open standard provides a considerable opportunity to design and implement innovative and revolutionary Web-based interfaces to support and augment engineering courses and design activities. Haptics devices and associated APIs are enabling a revolution in engineering interaction design and engineering education. Several use-cases and example Web3D applications are presented to provide an overview of the existing trends. A concise presentation of the human tactile system, followed by a survey on current haptics hardware accompanied by several successful implementations for engineering education, highlights the near future trends.