Can You Feel the Force? An Investigation of Haptic Collaboration in Shared Editors

Abstract

Users of collaborative systems are typically restricted to communication through voice and video links. Users find this difficult -- it does not encompass the richness of communication they are accustomed to in the real world. Attempting to address this problem we describe the implementation of a novel mechanism for haptic communication based around interactions between users' cursors. An initial, and mainly observational, evaluation is described, along with some promising results. We show improvements in subjective experience and suggest several, more formal, avenues for future research. 1.