Speaking Haptics: Proactive Haptic Articulation for Intercommunication in Virtual Environments

摘要

Communication is crucial in collaborative tasks. Multimodal strategies are commonly applied to complement, reinforce and disambiguate information exchange. However, although multimodal communication is commonplace in Collaborative Virtual Environments, the proactive use of touch for intercommunication is surprisingly neglected regardless its importance for communication. In this paper, we look up to elements present in speech articulation to introduce the proactive haptic articulation as a novel approach for communication in CVEs. We defend the hypothesis that elements present in natural language, when added to the design of the vibrotactile vocabulary, should provide an expressive medium for intercommunication. Moreover, we hypothesize that the ability to render tactile cues to a teammate will encourage users to adapt a given vocabulary spontaneously during its use. We implemented a case study around a collaborative puzzle task to demonstrate the use of such vocabulary. Results show that the proactive haptic articulation provided a way for participants to autonomously and dynamically adapt the provided tactile vocabulary to attend their communication needs during the task.