Collaborative metaphor for haptic designation in complex 3D environments

Designating targets, such as elementary primitives (e.g., vertices, edges and faces) or complex objects (e.g., 3D objects and structures), to a partner in Collaborative Virtual Environments is a real challenge in different applications. In fact, the communication constraints in such environments limit the understanding of the partner's actions, which lead to wrong selections and thus to conflicting actions. Beyond these limitations, applications providing complex data to manipulate, such as molecular environments, introduce additional constraints which limit the perception and access to the partner's working space. This paper proposes a remote designation procedure linked with an haptic attraction model for molecular deformation tasks, we propose to guide physically the partner to the designated atom. Experimental results showed a significant improvement in performance and efficiency for the different steps of collaborative tasks (i.e., designation/selection of atoms and deformation of structures). Moreover, this haptic guidance method enables more accurate selections of atoms for the partner.