Enhanced 3D Visuo-Haptic Simulators to Understand the Nature of Friction Forces

Visuo-haptic simulators (VHS) incorporate the sense of touch into a visual simulator to enrich the learning experience of the user. Through haptic feedback, VHS allow manipulating bodies in a visual simulator and feel the forces applied to them as if they were real. This work presents the design and implementation of a 3D VHS update aimed to support the understanding of friction forces, using the VIS-HAPT methodology proposed by our group. The simulator presents a block on an incline, where the values of the block's mass, incline angle, and the static and kinetic friction coefficients can be changed. The interface also shows dynamically the forces acting on the block in a free-body diagram. The VHS was tested in the August-December 2022 term, with a sample of 309 undergraduate engineering students, distributed in experimental and control groups with 164 and 145 students, respectively. A comparison of pre and post-tests applied to both groups showed that the experimental group obtained larger learning gains than the control group to a statistical significance level ofp = 0.014. This result suggests that the addition of the sense of touch in the VHS promoted a better student understanding of the nature of friction forces. By means of a perception questionnaire, students of the experimental group highly expressed opinions about the haptic activity and that it supported their learning of friction forces. All these findings motivate authors to design additional appropriate visuo-haptic scenarios to foster students learning of real-life physical forces.