Doctoral Work
Thesis: Contribution to the Study of Usability and Haptic Feedback of Encountered-Type Haptic Displays
Use case: Prototyping vehicles using virtual reality and haptic interfaces
My doctoral work was part of the LobbyBot project. The goal was to design and test new interaction techniques for integrating a robotic arm that provided haptic feedback in virtual reality. The integration of my research work in this use case was evaluated by experts from Clarté and the Renault Group.
Challenge 1
Interacting with a robot users cannot see in virtual reality
Users needed to interact with a virtual environment to touch surfaces, allowing them to evaluate shapes and materials for a car cockpit. A robotic arm placed a surface to be touched just in front of the users’ hands. The interaction between users and the robotic arm needed to be intuitive and discrete so the immersion could be maintained.
Challenge 2
Increasing haptic rendering capabilities
The surface placed by the robot was limited to a small prop with a set of textures that could be touched. In a car cockpit prototyping scenario, surfaces tend to be large, so how could the system be adapted to large rendering areas?
I designed a novel approach for rendering large surfaces using a multi-textured rotating prop. Users were able to touch larger surfaces by sliding their fingers across virtual surfaces while the robot rotated a multi-textured prop in synchrony with the users’ finger positions.
I also explored the possibility of having a detached tangible object that could be placed in several locations. This allowed users to manipulate tangible objects that could be relocated with the help of a robotic arm.
Challenge 3
Robot’s speed limitations
The robotic arm could not move fast enough from one place to another in order to minimize risks if users accidentally collided with it. Nevertheless, this introduced latency in haptic feedback rendering.
I designed a set of interaction techniques that informed users about the system’s state, allowing them to be aware of the time required for the system to render haptic feedback from one location to another.
Challenge 4
User safety
A major challenge of the interface used in my doctoral work was that the robot was hidden from the users’ view. User safety needed to be considered when having an unseen moving robot in front of them. However, showing the robot in the virtual environment would break user immersion.
I designed a set of visual warning cues that alerted users when they approached the robot. Several approaches were evaluated with a group of experts. In the end, the LobbyBot consortium integrated some of these techniques into their demo.