Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya: How to measure haptic Presence?

Only recently researchers have started to think about a sense of presence also in haptic systems. Collaborative and single user applications have been designed and evaluated, to understand the role of the haptic feedback in different situations. The concept of presence as ‘being there’ is clearly inadequate for use when dealing with responses to haptic feedback, whereas the approach that considers presence as `realistic´ response while operating in a virtual environment would be more appropriate. In close collaboration with the leaders of the project demonstrators (manipulation of virtual objects, personnel interaction or collaboration with direct or indirect contact in virtual environments) the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya is viewing a variety of methods adequate for the evaluation of haptic systems. The specific challenge is to deal with the very complex, multisensorial and usually bi-directional information exchange. Therefore, a large spectrum of methodologies used for the presence evaluation in VR is considered for the haptic presence evaluation including subjective as well as objective measures (ranging from i. e. questionnaires to physiological data, like i. e. heart rate or EEG). They allow the researchers to evaluate different configuration of the same system and define the characteristics that are more important for a specific task. The whole evaluation methodology will be on three different levels: the evaluation for the use of the system, the evaluation of the human factors and the usability aspects, and the evaluation of presence, in particular the haptic presence.

Related deliverables: Report on scenarios and evaluation criteria for each of the paradigms P2P, POP, P20.

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