VR Interaction for CAD Basic Tasks Using Rumble Feedback Input: Experimental Study

Virtual reality technology is constantly evolving in almost every field: display resolution and size, autostereoscopic screens, wireless tracking, computational power, graphics and interaction tools, and this progress is leading to a real industrial use [10]. In particular, last generation CAD applications can certainly benefit from 3D input and output offered by Virtual reality (VR) while modeling complex geometry with a parametric, featurebased approach. Previous work demonstrated how an optimized VR interface can perform 3D modeling and navigation in a very intuitive way and in particularly for conceptual or aesthetic design [6].

However, VRAD applications are very demanding in terms of input precision, visualization, interaction and 3D object shape awareness. But many studies demonstrated how dimension of object in synthetic environments can be misleading when using visual feedback only even after a correct virtual camera registration [13]. Nearly all of the studies to date that have compared distance perception in immersive virtual environments with the real world have found evidence that the virtual space is com pressed. Although considerable efforts have been undertaken to identify the sources of these effects, indications of distance compression have persisted under a wide range of display and technology conditions. This explains the need in virtual worlds of a physical sense of the confinement and constraint of the virtual objects which is usually provided by force feedback.