A study on spatially induced “virtual force” with an information theoretic investigation of human performance

Present virtual reality (VR) systems present powerful graphical information with human interaction capability but may be missing corresponding motion or force sensing inputs to the human operator. The concept of “virtual force” is introduced herein as a way to provide some of this missing sensing information. The “virtual force” environment is created in this paper using a displacement stick controller (joystick) with the reflective force on the controller being coordinated, in a spatial sense, with a visual scene displayed on a monitor. Force type fields are built about visual objects to provide proprioceptive feedback to the operator to improve his telepresence about the virtual scene. Since this study involves both information and control theory, certain equivalences are derived in the appendixes which extend to different plant dynamics not excluding small time delays which may appear anywhere in system. Data from a study of disabled patients and normals are presented to illustrate the efficacy of “virtual force” in terms of a performance measure related to transinformation (capacity or bits/second)