A Fitts’ Law Evaluation of Visuo-haptic Fidelity and Sensory Mismatch on User Performance in a Near-field Disc Transfer Task in Virtual Reality

The trade-off between speed and accuracy in precision tasks is important to evaluate during user interaction with input devices. When different sensory cues are added or altered in such interactions, those cues have an effect on this trade-off, and thus, they affect overall user performance. For instance, adding cues like haptic feedback and stereoscopic viewing will result in more realistic user interaction, thus improving performance in these tasks. Also, adding a noticeable disparity between physical and virtual movements creates a mismatch between visual and proprioceptive systems, which generally has a negative effect on performance. In this study, we investigate the effects of haptic feedback, stereoscopic viewing, and visuo-proprioceptive mismatch on how quickly and accurately users complete a virtual pick-and-place task using the PHANToM OMNI. Through this experiment, we find that in the movement phase of a ring transfer, movement time and user performance are affected by haptic feedback and visuo-proprioceptive mismatch, and the main effects of stereoscopic viewing appears to be limited to the more precise step when the ring is around the target peg.