The role of contextual haptic and visual constraints on object manipulation in virtual environments

An experiment was conducted to investigate the role of surrounding haptic and visual information on object manipulation in a virtual environment. The contextual haptic constraints were implemented with a physical table and the contextual visual constraints included a checkerboard background (“virtual table”). It was found that the contextual haptic constraints (the physical table surface) dramatically increased object manipulation speed, but slightly reduced spatial accuracy, compared to free space. The contextual visual constraints (presence of the checkerboard) actually showed detrimental effects on both object manipulation speed and accuracy. Implications of these findings for human-computer interaction design are discussed.