Isabelle Milleville-Pennel

Influences of haptic communication on a shared manual task

Abstract With the advent of new haptic feedback devices, researchers are giving serious consideration to the incorporation of haptic communication in collaborative virtual environments. For instance, haptic interactions based tools can be used for medical and related education whereby students can train in minimal invasive surgery using virtual reality before approaching human subjects. To design virtual environments that support haptic communication, a deeper understanding of humans′ haptic interactions is required. In this paper, human′s haptic collaboration is investigated. A collaborative virtual environment was designed to support performing a shared manual task. To evaluate this system, 60 medical students participated to an experimental study. Participants were asked to perform in dyads a needle insertion task after a training period. Results show that compared to conventional training methods, a visual-haptic training improves user′s collaborative performance. In addition, we found that haptic interaction influences the partners′ verbal communication when sharing haptic information. This indicates that the haptic communication training changes the nature of the users′ mental representations. Finally, we found that haptic interactions increased the sense of copresence in the virtual environment: haptic communication facilitates users′ collaboration in a shared manual task within a shared virtual environment. Design implications for including haptic communication in virtual environments are outlined.

Haptic Communication to Support Biopsy Procedures Learning in Virtual Environments

In 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.

Driving for real or on a fixed-base simulator: Is it so different? an explorative study

The use of driving simulators to assess driving abilities is often controversial because of their artificiality. Our aim is thus to tackle this question by estimating and comparing new indicators such as the mental workload, the psychological feeling (e.g., stress, anxiety, pleasure, and mastery), and feeling of presence when driving a simulator and a real vehicle (either ones own or one that belongs to a driving school). We are most interested in a particular sort of real-world driving: the driving school. This situation has two advantages: It matches our own particular interest in the evaluation of driving abilities and, to some extent, it is as artificial as driving in a simulator. Fourteen expert drivers participated in this study. Each driver was invited to complete two questionnaires (i.e., the NASA-TLX and Questionnaire of Psychological Feeling) that relate to the various driving conditions (i.e., simulator, driving school vehicle, and personal vehicle). The heart rate of drivers was also recorded at rest and during some of the driving conditions. Our results indicate that the feeling of presence was, for some of its component parts, identical in both the simulator and in a real car. Moreover, in both the simulator and real car, none of the assessments of presence revealed values that were close to 100%; indeed, sometimes they were considerably lower. This result leads us to believe that presence may often be underestimated in virtual environments because of the lack of an objective value of reference in the real world. Moreover, results obtained for mental workload and affective feeling indicate that a simulator can be a useful tool for the initial resumption of driving after a period off the road. In particular, a simulator can help to avoid the sort of stress that can lead to task failure or a deterioration in performance.

Influence of contextual objects on spatial interactions and viewpoints sharing in virtual environments

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are 3D spaces in which users share virtual objects, communicate, and work together. To collaborate efficiently, users must develop a common representation of their shared virtual space. In this work, we investigated spatial communication in virtual environments. In order to perform an object co-manipulation task, the users must be able to communicate and exchange spatial information, such as object position, in a virtual environment. We conducted an experiment in which we manipulated the contents of the shared virtual space to understand how users verbally construct a common spatial representation of their environment. Forty-four students participated in the experiment to assess the influence of contextual objects on spatial communication and sharing of viewpoints. The participants were asked to perform in dyads an object co-manipulation task. The results show that the presence of a contextual object such as fixed and lateralized visual landmarks in the virtual environment positively influences the way male operators collaborate to perform this task. These results allow us to provide some design recommendations for CVEs for object manipulation tasks.

Comparing Haptic and Visual Training Method of Learning Chinese Handwriting with a Haptic Guidance

In this paper a use of haptic and visual training for Chinese handwriting learning is investigated. Participants learned a given character under three training conditions (haptic, visual, haptic-visual) and were required to write the given character plus two characters with common stokes on a tablet before and after training for improvement comparison. Performance was measured in terms of mean speed, inair time, size, order, and shape. Findings from this study indicate that visual information provides benefits for learning writing shape, while haptic information showed significant improvement in the transfer of shape learning. The combination of visual and haptic information helped to reduce air time, and showed better results than only visual information

Cognitive control by brain-injured car drivers: an exploratory study

Cognitive control is a key tool for adaptation in dynamic situations. The aim of the study is to assess the relevance of a theoretical framework for cognitive control in dynamic situations, in order to understand brain-injured (BI) car drivers cognitive impairment. The framework supports a cognitive control multimodality based on the crossing of two orthogonal dimensions: symbolic/subsymbolic; anticipative/reactive control. BI car drivers behaviour was compared with that of a control group (CTRL) during driving simulator scenarios. Eye movement analysis, among other variables, revealed that BI car drivers made use of a more symbolic and reactive control than did CTRL drivers. CTRL drivers showed a more stable cognitive compromise than BI drivers. The latter became less symbolic and more reactive in the case of difficult scenarios. In addition, BI drivers focused on the main task of trajectory management, with fewer resources devoted to traffic interaction management. Statement of Relevance:An explanation of differences between BI and CTRL drivers in terms of cognitive control requirements, attention and processing speed is put forward. From this, it is possible to derive some implications in terms of driver assistance (e.g. lane keeping or a warning assistance device) and rehabilitation.

Elaboration of a common frame of reference in collaborative virtual environments

Motivation -- To design virtual environments that support collaborative activities.n Research approach -- An experimental approach in which 44 students were asked to work in pairs to reconstruct five 3D figures.n Findings/Design -- The results show that including a contextual clue in virtual environments improves collaboration between operators.n Research limitations -- Further investigative work must be carried out to extract accurate female collaboration profiles.n Originality/Value -- The results enable three collaboration profiles to be identified. They also allow the extraction of some characteristics of a contextual clue which can be added to a virtual environment to improve collaboration.n Take away message -- The contents of a collaborative virtual environment influences the way that users collaborate.

Influence des systèmes de référence sur les profils de collaboration dans un environnement virtuel

Virtual collaborative environment are 3D shared spaces in which people can work together. To collaborate through these systems users must have a shared comprehension of the environment. In this study we manipulated contents of a virtual environment to understand how people construct compatible comprehensions of this shared environment. Results show that the use of stable visual landmarks leads to different collaboration profiles.