Haptic Hybrid Rotations: Overcoming Hardware Angular Limitations of Force-Feedback Devices

This paper describes a new interaction technique called haptic hybrid rotations to overcome the physical angular limitations of force-feedback devices when manipulating virtual objects. This technique is based on a hybrid control of the object manipulated with the device. When approaching the angular mechanical stops of the device, the control mode switches from angular position-control to rate-control. The forcefeedback of the device is used to simulate the use of an elastic device in the rate-control mode. An experiment was carried out to compare this technique with two other common alternatives that are used when manipulating virtual objects with force-feedback devices: rotations scaling, and the clutching technique. Our results showed that haptic hybrid rotations were both the fastest and the most appreciated technique for the proposed experiment.