Lei Liu, Robert van Liere, and Krzysztof J. Kruszynski
virtual reality, 3d path steering, the steering law, user study, haptic devices and techniques
Path steering is an interaction task that requires a user to navigate through a path of a given length and width. In 1997, Accot and Zhai developed the steering law for modeling 2D steering tasks. Recently, we extended the steering law for 3D manipulation tasks, by introducing path curvature as an additional factor to the steering law. The extension to the steering law has been verified through an experiment in which users were required to perform the steering tasks with a six degree-of-freedom tracker. In this paper, we introduce the force feedback to the 3D steering tasks using a haptic input device. Our aim is to compare users' performance between haptic and non-haptic steering tasks and verify the steering law and its extension in the presence of force feedback. A controlled experiment has been conducted with force feedback turned on and off. The results indicate that the users' performance with force feedback turned on has been improved in two ways: the task completion time improves by 60.23% and the accuracy of the movement by 78.27%. This improvement is significantly greater than what has been reported in 2D. In addition, we also demonstrate that both the steering law and its extension can be utilized to model the steering tasks carried out with a haptic device and that the extension outperforms the steering law according to Akaike Information Criterion (AIC).
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