Effect of control movement scale on visual haptic interactions

Abstract

Although the human hand is a complex system which can perform multiple actions, when the kinaesthetic actions are scaled in a system, the applications are limitless. In this paper, we examine the effect of control movement scale on user’s kinaesthetic actions. We use the Fitts’ Law for quantifying the user’s performance on different scales and to verify if higher control movement scale, in general, can be better than natural movements in tasks which require extended accuracy. The experiment consists of a Wacom™ tablet as an input device connected to a system. The tablet provides means for scaling the kinaesthetic input movement of a user. The experiment is a modified version of the classical multi-directional tapping task. It was performed on 16 healthy participants with ages between 20 to 48 years. The Fitts’ regressions were visualised and the Z-scores were computed. It was found that the performance of the participants increases with the scale and has an optimum scale at 1:3.3 before reducing rapidly. Future works include experiments involving 3D models and other haptic input devices.