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Communicative Functions of Haptic Feedback in Collaborative Settings.

Special Symposium at EuroHaptics 2010

Wednesday, July 7, 2010, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

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Description

The question in focus of this workshop is: what communicative functions can haptic feedback have in a collaborative setting?

Being able to explore with your hands and communicate at the same time facilitate co-learning and coordination of joint action. Traditionally, gestures have been described as individually performed actions but what if two people do a gesture together holding on to the same object or to a networked pointing device? Is that still gesture or something else, maybe it is guiding or guidance? Can deictic references or e.g. pantomimic gestures be purely haptic? These questions also concern transference of what is referred to as tacid or implicit knowledge. Apart from the ones mentioned above, there are other useful functions of haptic feedback for collaboration such as handing off objects, pulling in each end of something or jointly holding on to an object and do a manoeuvre that needs more than one person. In this workshop concrete examples are presented and discussed in terms of how the touch modality can be used in haptic interfaces in order for people to communicate and collaborate. Also, the technical challenges of distributed haptic feedback will be discussed.

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Target Audience

The target audience of the workshop is researchers and practitioners focusing on, haptic feedback supporting people in settings where more than one user are involved. We welcome contributions from both a technical and a social perspective. Remember that collaborative settings can range from co-located to distributed work and between work in real time to temporally distributed work. A collaborative situation can e.g. be a teacher advising a student on a mathematical or surgical procedure. An interdisciplinary pre-operative meeting with radiologists and surgeons where patient data such as CT images are discussed is also a collaborative situation. A situation where a group of scientists discuss and try out different ways of docking protein in a molecule has collaborative aspects. A silver smith that shows how to hit the material in the best way as well as a personal assistant that trains handwriting with a visually impaired child and many other situations are collaborative. In each case haptic feedback can have interesting communicative functions that aid collaboration.

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Objectives

The objective of the workshop is to gather researchers with an interest in different aspects on the effects of using haptic interfaces for collaboration. The organisers of the workshop are involved in several projects ranging from scientific perceptualisation, assistive technology, oral surgery simulation for teaching wisdom tooth extraction, to a project with the aim of exploring the use of haptic feedback at multidisciplinary medical meetings at a gastro clinic. We invite other researchers and practitioners to share their research and experience from their different projects focussing specifically on the collaborative perspective. It might be that the collaborative aspects in your project have not been addressed so far. In that case, interesting collaborative aspects can be identified during the discussion in this workshop.

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Themes

The workshop will focus on the following suggested themes, all in relation to the communication process during collaboration using multi-modal interfaces. Topics include but are not limited to:

  • Scientific perceptualisation/visualisation for joint problem solving
  • Haptic feedback systems in medical domains
  • Interrelations between haptic, auditory and visual feedback
  • Haptic feedback in simulations for learning purposes
  • Haptic feedback and telepresence
  • Assistive technology
  • Technical solutions to delay related problems in distributed haptic environments
  • Dialogue analysis focussing on the effects of haptic feedback
  • Neuroscience and haptic cognition relevant for joint action
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Submissions

  • Position papers should be submitted at the 17th of May
  • Position papers submitted to the workshop should be 4-8 pages
  • Demonstrations complementing position papers are welcome
  • Submissions should address the themes and topics of the workshop
  • Submissions should be sent as PDF to Eva-Lotta Sallnäs, email: evalotta@csc.kth.se
  • Participants will be notified about acceptance by the 31st of May.
At least one author of accepted workshop papers needs to register for the workshop and for the conference itself.

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Organisation and Duration

The workshop will be held on July 7, at the VU University in Amsterdam from 9.00 to 13.00 o’clock. Before the workshop, contributions will be collected and reviewed by the workshop organisers. All individual contributions will be distributed before the workshop and all participants are asked to read the contributions before the workshop. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions. Participants will present their paper shortly for about 10 min and the rest of the time will be focused on discussions on the suggested themes, which will be adjusted based on the contributions.

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Expected Outcomes

Expected outcomes of this workshop are three-folded:

  • to initiate a network within this area of research
  • to get a broader perspective of the state of the art research within this area
  • to initiate future collaborations, organise other workshops or research meetings with the aim of producing prototypes, test scenarios and/or publications.
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Workshop Organisers

The workshop is organised by participants from the MCE project (Multimodal Collaborative Environments) at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology):

Eva-Lotta Sallnäs, Assistant professor
Dept of Human-Computer Interaction
Royal Institute of Technology
Stockholm, Sweden
Email: evalotta@csc.kth.se.
Web page: http://hci.csc.kth.se/personView.jsp?userName=evalotta

Jonas Forsslund
Technical assistant
Dept of Human-Computer Interaction
Royal Institute of Technology
Stockholm, Sweden

Jonas Moll, Ph.D. student
Dept of Human-Computer Interaction
Royal Institute of Technology
Stockholm, Sweden.

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