Effects of DOF separation on elastic devices for the navigation in 3D virtual environments with force feedback

We investigated the use of a new haptic device called DigiHaptic in a 3D navigation task. Unlike other devices intended to interact in 3D with one end-effector, the DigiHaptic has three levers that the user may handle simultaneously or not in elastic mode to rate control objects. We compared it to the SpaceMouse-another elastic device - to evaluate the influence that degrees of freedom (DOF) separation and force feedback have in terms of accuracy (errors) and speed (time) in a 3D navigation task. We found that users performed the task with the same amount of time on both devices but that DOF separation increases the control accuracy of the camera.