Effects of Tactile Interruption on Hand-Eye Coordination Task Performance

Hand-eye coordination is essential for everyday tasks when inter-acting with real and virtual worlds, as researchers have found it important for virtual reality training and simulation applications. However, to our know ledge, there are no findings concerning the effect of tactile interruptions in virtual reality hand-eye coordination tasks. Thus, we conducted a within-group study (N = 31) with five tactile feedback conditions (no tactile feedback, weak linear tactile feedback, strong linear tactile feedback, weak pulsive tactile feedback, and strong pulsive tactile feedback) to examine the effect of tactile interruption on hand-eye coordination task performance. We collected data logs from our virtual reality application, including total completion time, error rate, and throughput. Based on our results, we indicate that tactile interruptions significantly affect hand-eye coordination task performance. Specifically, when we exposed our participants to strong pulsive tactile feedback, they spent the most time completing the task. When we exposed them to weak linear tactile feedback, they spent less time than with strong linear and weak pulsive tactile feedback. We also found that when we exposed our participants to strong pulsive tactile feedback, they had the least throughput performance in our hand-eye coordination task. In this paper, we discuss our findings and limitations and provide de-sign considerations and future directions for virtual reality hand-eye coordination studies.