Collaboration Meets Fitts’ Law: Passing Virtual Objects With and Without Haptic Force Feedback

Abstract: Handing over objects is a common event during collaboration in face-to-face interaction. We investigate how such an event can be supported when the interaction takes place in virtual space. In a formal experiment, subjects passed a series of cubic objects to each other and tapped them at target areas. Their performance with and without haptic force feedback was evaluated. Furthermore, we placed our study in the framework of Fitts ’ law and hypothesized that object hand off constituted a collaboratively performed Fitts ’ law task. Our results showed that task completion time indeed linearly increased with Fitts ’ index of difficulty, both with and without force feedback. The time required for passing objects did not differ significantly between the haptic and nonhaptic condition. However, the error rate was significantly lower with haptic feedback than without