Proactive haptic articulation for intercommunication in collaborative virtual environments

In this paper, we look upon elements present in speech articulation to introduce proactive haptic articulation as a novel approach for communication in Collaborative Virtual Environments. We defend the hypothesis that elements present in natural language, when added to the design of the vibrotactile vocabulary, should provide an expressive medium for intercommunication. Moreover, the ability to render tactile cues to a teammate should encourage users to extrapolate a given vocabulary while using it. We implemented a collaborative puzzle task to observe the use of such vocabulary. Results show that participants autonomously adapted it to attend their communication needs during the assembly.