Arturo S. García

Enhancing collaborative manipulation through the use of feedback and awareness in CVEs

In the research community, Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) developers usually refer to the terms awareness and feedback as something necessary to maintain a fluent collaboration when highly interactive task have to be performed. However, it is remarkable that few studies address the effect that including special kind of awareness has on the task performance and the user experience.n This paper proposes how to face the implementation of awareness in order to be taken into account early in the development of a CVE. In addition, it is also described an experiment that was carried out to evaluate the effect of providing some visual cues, showing that users tend to make more mistakes when they are not provided.

The development of glove-based interfaces with the TRES-D methodology

The development of 3D user interfaces is mostly focused on technology and the ways of using it, and so the main concerns are the selection of hardware, software and interaction techniques. The process of development itself is as important as these issues, but it is usually ignored or poorly documented. This paper introduces the TRES-D methodology, and illustrates its application in the development of three different glove-based interfaces, not only to show the benefits of using these devices, but also the benefits of using such a methodological framework.

An experimental study of collaborative interaction tasks supported by awareness and multimodal feedback

Awareness and feedback have been identified by many researchers as key concepts to achieve fluent collaboration when performing highly interactive collaborative tasks. However, it is remarkable that few studies address the effect that adding special kinds of feedback has on user awareness and task performance.n This work follows a preliminary experiment in which we already studied awareness in Collaborative Virtual Environments, evaluating the effect of visual cues in collaborative task performance and showing that users tend to make more mistakes when such feedback is not provided, that is, they are less aware of the object at hand and the task mate. These early results were promising and encouraged us to continue investigating the benefit of increasing the awareness support for tasks that require close collaboration between users, but this time analyzing more types of awareness and experimenting with visual, audio and vibrotactile feedback cues.

Collaborative virtual environments: you can't do it alone, can you?

Many Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have been developed to date. However, when focusing our attention on the way users perform their task in these systems, there is still little research on understanding the impact of different platforms on the collaboration experience. This paper describes not only a CVE, in this case, one that reproduces a block building game; but also an experiment that was carried out to evaluate both the interaction using different input and output technologies and the impact of collaboration on task performance and overall experience.

Prototyping and evaluating glove-based multimodal interfaces

Despite the early demonstrations a couple of decades ago, multimodal interfaces still present several challenges. One of these challenges is the creation of such kind of interfaces, which is currently being tackled by the OpenInterface project. The other challenge is related to the lack of experience of evaluating multimodal interfaces, which raises the question of how to check usability in such interfaces. In this context, this paper presents a new contribution to the OpenInterface project by adding data glove support, which is illustrated by prototyping a viewer for large size images. This application is also presented as a case study for usability evaluation, trying to translate our experience of multiple evaluations conducted at our VR lab.

Weight and Size Discrimination with Vibrotactile Feedback

Interaction is gradually moving from desktop computers to the open air thanks to depth sensors such as Kinect, Xtion and Leap Motion. In this new situation, in which the user is no longer holding any device, the simulation of the sense of touch is progressively gaining more interest. This paper describes how VITAKI, a VIbro Tactile prototyping tool Kit for Eccentric Rotating Mass (ERM) actuators, was used to test different haptic properties of objects in two experiments. VITAKI has been successfully used in the identification of 2D shapes and textures, and 3D shapes. However, there are some haptic properties of objects that have not been simulated using VITAKI yet. These are hardness, temperature, weight and size. This paper describes how VITAKI is used to assess whether differences in weight and size can be discriminated using vibrotactile technology. To analyze these new features, two different experiments were carried out by 18 participants. The results of the experiments are presented in this paper, and allowed us to successfully validate the introduced techniques with a success rate higher than 88% in the case of the size, and between 78 and 85% in the case of the weight, depending on the method used.

A study of multimodal feedback to support collaborative manipulation tasks in virtual worlds

In the research community, developers of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) usually refer to the terms awareness and feedback as something necessary to maintain a fluent collaboration when highly interactive tasks have to be performed. However, it is remarkable that few studies address the effect that including special kinds of feedback has on user awareness and task performance. This work follows a preliminary experiment where we already studied awareness in CVEs, evaluating the effect of visual cues in the performance of collaborative tasks and showing that users tend to make more mistakes when such feedback is not provided, that is, they are less aware. These early results were promising and encouraged us to continue investigating the benefit of improving awareness in tasks that require close collaboration between users, but this time analyzing more types of awareness and experimenting with visual, audio and vibrotactile feedback cues.

Creation and Evaluation of a Virtual and Collaborative Playground

Focusing on the way users perform their tasks in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), there is still little research on understanding the impact of different platforms on the collaboration experience, as well as on which tasks a collaborative approach is worth using. Addressing both issues, this paper describes not only a CVE, being one that reproduces a block building game, but also an experiment aimed to evaluate the performance and the overall collaborative experience, as regards the impact that different input and output technologies employed by users and the tasks performed by them have on it. In addition, this paper also describes implementation details of the CVE that are rarely discussed in the literature, presenting an environment model that is based on the novel idea ofinteraction views.

A Space Model for 3D User Interface Development

Space deserves a special attention when designing 3D user interfaces. However, many proposed methods rely on simple sketches and/or maps. Besides, those methods usually leave aside the 2D interfaces that may be found in the 3D environment or that surround it. This chapter presents an attempt to formalize 2D and 3D spaces by the definition of a meta-model. This is one of three meta-models that have been defined in three-dimensional user interface development methodology, which is also described here along with some case studies, focusing the description on space.

Towards an interaction model in collaborative virtual environments

This paper highlights some of the current problems in CVE development. These problems are mainly due to a lack of a good interaction model guiding the behaviour of the environments. This paper introduces the definition of a model based on the idea of the interaction views. The key concepts for understanding interaction views are also given during the explanation of the model. The paper also describes a reference architecture based on this model which can be found useful for the design of modelling tools, and a prototype application that helps understanding both the architecture and the model.