Collaborative manual tasks in distributed virtual environments

We often encounter many situations where we manually interact with others collaboratively. This allows us to solve tasks that we would otherwise not be able to do on our own. Handover tasks are an everyday interaction that we perform with others without thinking about it. However, these tasks are complex coordinated actions between two actors based on sensory feedback that are performed in a very short time. In this work, an overview of handover tasks will be provided from a perspective of the interdisciplinary fields of human-robot interaction (HRI), neuroscience, cognitive science and human-computer interaction (HCI). For this purpose, the structure and process of a handover interaction will be examined and the current state of research will be reflected. The ability to represent realistic manual interactions in an immersive collaborative scenario enables the simulation and training of complex workflows in a realistic context. The study design presented in this paper is intended to improve the understanding and design of handover interaction techniques in virtual environments. Furthermore possibilities to substitute missing haptic feedback with other sensory stimuli will be evaluated.