Poster: The effect of target size and force feedback on 3D selection within a co-located visual-haptic immersive virtual environment

For immersive virtual environments (IVEs), the ease with which users are able to select 3D objects can influence their ability to complete tasks. By including haptic force feedback, it is commonly thought that this cue will provide significant benefits to the user [5] [1]. Whilst this is true when performing simple tasks, such as moving to select a single target, for more complex scenarios that involve multiple objects it has been shown that the interaction between haptic force feedback and selection performance is less straight forward [4]. We expand this argument by investigating how changes in target size and haptic force feedback affects the movement strategies taken when selecting multiple objects. The key observation is that although it may be easier to select a single large target, the presence of `hard´ haptic force feedback responses displayed upon contact is a significant hindrance to overall task performance when trying to select a subsequent object. By understanding the effects of haptic force feedback on 3D interaction, we believe this will inform designers how best to build better multi-modal 3D user interfaces.