Persuading people in a remote destination to sing by beaming there

Abstract

We built a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) allowing one person, the 'visitor' to be digitally transported to a remote destination to interact with local people there. This included full body tracking, vibrotactile feedback and voice. This allowed interactions in the same CVE between multiple people situated in different physical remote locations. This system was used for an experiment to study whether the conveyance of touch has an impact on the willingness of participants embodied in the CVE to sing in public. In a first experimental condition, the experimenter virtually touched the avatar of the participants on the shoulder, producing vibrotactile feedback. In another condition using the identical physical setup, the vibrotactile displays were not activated, so that they would not feel the touch. Our hypothesis was that the tactile touch condition would produce a greater likelihood of compliance with the request to sing. In a second part we examined the hypothesis that people might be more willing to sing (execute an embarrassing task) in a CVE, because of the anonymity provided by virtual reality. Hence we carried out a similar study in physical reality. The results suggest that the tactile intervention had no effect on the sensations of body ownership, presence or the behaviours of the participants, in spite of the finding that the sensation of touch itself was effectively realised. Moreover we found an overall similarity in responses between the VR and real conditions.

Extending the reach of social touch through haptic technology

“…Nevertheless, there was no difference between the visual-only and visual-tactile touch conditions, as all participants were found to be willing to sing [58]. Because there was no no-touch control condition in this study, it is difficult to say what the effect of touch, visual or visual-tactile, was exactly.…”

“…One group of researchers used a rather elaborate VR setup to investigate how mediated social touch could affect compliance to a request that was made [58]. The setup in question not only tracked a person's head movements, but, by having participants wear a Power Rangers-worthy full-body Lycra suite with visual markers and an optical tracking system, could also track participants' body movements.…”

“…With the use of a duplicate of this setup two or more people can be in two separate physical locations but share the same virtual space. In this particular study two participants and one confederate shared the same virtual space and it was the task of the confederate to convince both participants to sing, a task which is usually met with reluctance and embarrassment [58]. One group of participants would only see the touch while another would also feel the touch through a vibrotactile display worn on the upper arm.…”

“…365]. Alternatively, as was rightfully remarked by the researchers, it could also be that the request to sing was not experienced by participants as a difficult or embarrassing request at all [58]. Remember that the extent to which an actual social touch affects pro-social behavior depends on the type of request that is being made [e.g.…”

Immersive Mixed Reality for Manufacturing Training

“…Similarly, these realistic behaviors can also influence training, and several authors have already used VR as a tool for training and rehearsal in medical situations (Seymour et al, 2002;von Websky et al, 2013), disaster relief training (Farra et al, 2013), and other skill trainings related to motor control (Kishore et al, 2014;Padrao et al, 2016). However, while VR may be an excellent approach for isolated training, it is increasingly complex to use for collaborative training or faceto-face setups (Churchill and Snowdon, 1998;Monahan et al, 2008;Bourdin et al, 2013;Gonzalez-Franco et al, 2015). In such scenarios, systems require several computers, complex network synchronization, and labor-intensive application development.…”