In high-stakes collaborative situations, a decline in collaboration quality can lead to adverse events with significant consequences. Analyses performed by Human factor (HF) specialists, while effective in identifying and addressing collaboration issues, are case-specific and most of the time performed a posteriori. To address these limitations, our research focuses on a real-time assessment of collaboration processes using multimodal signals collected and analyzed during the activity. Existing collaboration profiles taxonomies face limitations such as a posteriori profiles detection and the absence of quantitative behavioral indicators that can be measured during the activity. Leveraging Virtual Reality (VR), we have developed a framework for evaluating collaboration in controlled setting, testing the effectiveness of a subset of multimodal signals to detect collaboration profiles. We test our approach in a study including 11 stereotyped collaborative scenarios applied to a VR puzzle-solving task. This study reveals the effectiveness of our approach in distinguishing between non-collaborative and highly collaborative profiles. However, challenges arise in discriminating between closely related collaborative profiles. This paper also proposes some guidelines on how to improve the collaboration profile detection framework and address other collaborative situations.

Public speaking is a near universally anxiety inducing social situation. Applications recreating social interactions with autonomous agents in virtual reality have been proposed as tools to alleviate public speaking anxiety, recreating exposure therapy methods with virtual audiences. To be efficient, such applications rely on the precise induction of controlled amounts of social stress. We reviewed the literature that studied the effect of virtual audience behaviors on participants’ stress levels, and found contradictory results that we attempt to explain in this article. We examine those studies and propose that social presence is one of the important factors mediating the effect of audience behavior on stress levels, and through social presence we can explain the different effects of audience behavior on stress observed in past studies. We conducted a study to test this theory, and expected that high social presence would lead to larger difference in stress induced by positive and negative audiences, as opposed to lower social presence which would attenuate the effect of audience behavior. We compared two display mediums, VR headsets to induce high social presence and wall projection to induce low social presence. We find an interaction effect of social presence and audience behavior on subjectively reported stress levels, but not on physiological measures.

According to medical experts, haptic realism is difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to have inter-expert agreement on the haptic feedback of one simulation. However haptic feedback is important in medical training, and allows educators to share the forces felt during a procedure if they know and trust what a particular virtual simulator will provide to the trainee. A new approach is proposed to refine bio-mechanical models with experts' input, to closely match the forces felt during a simulated procedure with an expert trainer's expectations. By allowing experts to tune a training scenario's haptic feedback as they trial a newly developed case, the experts can replicate their haptic perception and match their expectations with the simulation.

Haptic sensation is difficult to describe verbally. An experiment was performed to evaluate the viability of using a contra lateral haptic replication task to elicit haptic information from subjects, bypassing verbal description. Subjects received force input of four magnitudes in four directions from one haptic device to the hand, and attempted to reproduce it in another haptic device that was held in the contra lateral hand. Results showed that although subjects tended to overshoot when reproducing the forces, it is a viable method for decoding and encoding haptic information without verbal description.

International audience

This article presents MaggLite, a toolkit and sketch-based interface builder allowing fast and interactive design of post-WIMP user interfaces. MaggLite improves design of advanced UIs thanks to its novel mixed-graph architecture that dynamically combines scene-graphs with interaction-graphs. Scene-graphs provide mechanisms to describe and produce rich graphical effects, whereas interaction-graphs allow expressive and fine-grained description of advanced interaction techniques and behaviors such as multiple pointers management, toolglasses, bimanual interaction, gesture, and speech recognition. Both graphs can be built interactively by sketching the UI and specifying the interaction using a dataflow visual language. Communication between the two graphs is managed at runtime by components we call Interaction Access Points. While developers can extend the toolkit by refining built-in generic mechanisms, UI designers can quickly and interactively design, prototype and test advanced user interfaces by applying the MaggLite principle: "draw it, connect it and run it".