Sharing Roughness with Hand-Outline Visualization to Reduce Sensory Asymmetry in VR Collaboration

2026-08-29

AI Summary

研究通过在VR协作中使用手轮廓可视化方法来减少触觉信息不对称，利用线条形状和运动的视觉线索编码粗糙度，提高非触觉用户的信息获取和协作效率。

Abstract

In collaborative VR, asymmetric access to haptic hardware creates a critical information gap: tactile evidence remains private to the haptic user, hindering the shared understanding needed for joint decision-making. While prior work has explored crossmodal sensory cues in virtual environments, it remains unclear how such cues should be designed for asymmetric collaboration, where collaborators receive information through different modalities. In our setting, the haptic user feels roughness through fingertip vibration, whereas the non-haptic user relies on vision alone. To reduce this asymmetry, we propose externalizing an object's tactile state through a glanceable hand-outline visual proxy. Specifically, we examine whether abstract visual roughness cues based on line shape and motion can encode three discrete roughness levels for both haptic and non-haptic users. Two preliminary studies establish a shared visual semantics by identifying visually distinguishable cues for non-haptic users and validating their visuo-haptic correspondence for haptic users. In a main study of a collaborative sorting task, showing this visualization on both users' hands significantly reduced completion time relative to a no-visualization baseline. Moreover, NU-side cue visibility was associated with higher confidence and perceived contribution for the non-haptic user. These findings show that hand-anchored abstract visual cues provide a lightweight means of externalizing object tactile state, reducing information asymmetry without compromising social presence.

Problem

• asymmetric collaboration
• haptic hardware
• crossmodal sensory cues
• information asymmetry
• virtual reality

Innovation

• hand-outline visualization
• sensory asymmetry
• collaborative VR
• abstract visual cues
• tactile state externalization