The Impact of Haptic Feedback During Sudden, Rapid Virtual Interactions

Haptic feedback is known to improve the realism and the performance of virtual tasks during manipulation or teleoperation tasks. However, these benefits might depend on the nature of virtual tasks or the intensity of haptic rendering. In this paper, we focused on the impact of the presence and the intensity of the haptic stimulus during sudden, rapid virtual interactions through a variation of an ISO 9241:411 task- instead of calm, exploration-based interactions. We conducted a user study where the haptic stimulus is rendered through a realistic 1-DoF fingertip haptic device with different intensity levels (full-strength, half-strength, and no-strength) as they are asked to choose highlighted targets on a 6-by-5 grid as fast and correctly as possible. Our results show that haptic feedback did not significantly affect user performance regarding time, throughput, or the nature of the selection behavior. However, participants made significantly more errors when haptic feedback was present in half-strength compared to full-strength and no-strength conditions. In the post-experiment questionnaire, participants reported having favored haptic feedback in full strength in terms of perceived realism, enjoyment, and immersion.