Virtual fixtures for secondary tasks

The insertion of data in personal devices (e.g. mobile phones, GPS devices) tends to distract us from the primary task (e.g driving) that we are executing because of the necessity of deviating our visual attention to a secondary task. In this work we have tested the benefits introduced by the haptic feedback as a facility for a very common secondary tasks, namely the insertion of strings in an input device. Experiments demonstrate that the presence of virtual fixtures improves performances during input tasks and decreases the distraction of the user from the primary task.