Haptic Designation Tool to Improve Working Strategy in Collaborative Virtual Environment

Coordinating team´s work in a 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments is a real challenge. The communication constraints in such environments reduces the understanding between the partner´s and thus complicates the team´s coordintation. In order to facilitate the coordination, this paper proposes a hap tic tool for the designation of targets. This tool was experimented in a context of collaborative molecular design where one user designates tasks and coordinates the actions of two operators. The experimental results show an improvement of the working efficiency of the group and a better sharing of the activity between partners. Moreover, we observe that the hap tic guidance enables an accurate selection of targets which leads to an improvement of performance during the deformation process.