Haptic interpersonal communication: improvement of actions coordination in collaborative virtual environments

This article explores the use of haptic feedback for interpersonal communication in collaborative virtual environments. After a detailed presentation of all communication mechanisms involved, we propose the investigation of a low-level communication approach through the feedthrough mechanism. This channel is used to communicate kinematic information about a partner's gestures during closely coupled collaboration. Several communication metaphors, with complementary behaviors, were investigated to improve the coordination between two partners during an assembly task. The results clearly show the role of communication strategies for the improvement of gesture coordination and highlight the correlation between applied force and the level of efficiency.