Abstract As virtual reality (VR) simulators become increasingly central to technical training, realistic haptic feedback is often assumed to enhance user experience, skill acquisition, and transfer to real-world tasks. This study investigates the impact of haptic feedback on basic technical motor skill training in VR, focusing on early-stage skills involving bimanual coordination, fine motor control, and precise tool-mediated object placement under visual and temporal constraints, with limited force modulation requirements. An immersive simulator implementing a bimanual “Ring Transfer” task was developed, requiring participants to precisely grasp and transfer small objects using two tools under visual guidance and timing constraints, with minimal force modulation. A closely matched physical setup replicating workspace dimensions, tool geometry, and interaction mechanics was used to assess skill transfer. Twenty-four novice participants were assigned to three groups: haptic (HC), no-haptic (NC), and control (CC), consistent with an a priori power analysis. The HC and NC groups completed nine training sessions over two weeks, followed by post-test and delayed retention evaluations conducted one week later. Performance was measured using task completion time and error rate, and user experience was assessed using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and a validated Presence Questionnaire. Results show that the NC group initially outperformed the HC group, likely due to increased cognitive and sensorimotor demands associated with adapting to force feedback. However, the latter demonstrated greater performance improvement over time. Both groups reported high usability, while the HC group reported significantly higher scores on the haptics dimension of the Presence Questionnaire. In the physical post-test, both trained groups significantly outperformed the control group, confirming effective transfer from VR to real-world performance. However, no significant difference was found between the HC and NC groups, indicating that the increased perceived realism associated with haptic feedback did not translate into measurable performance gains for this task. These findings highlight a task-dependent role of haptic feedback. In this study, basic tasks are characterized by a predominant reliance on visual guidance and spatial precision, with limited requirements for force control or tactile discrimination. For such tasks, visual information alone may be sufficient to support skill transfer. This suggests that the benefits of haptics in VR training depend on task demands, particularly the extent to which force control and tactile cues are required, whereas tasks involving significant force modulation or interaction with deformable objects may benefit more from haptic feedback.

With the increasing use of immersive simulators in surgical training, there is an emerging emphasis on providing realistic haptic feedback. Although haptic feedback is recognized as necessary for surgical skill acquisition, its role in transferring those skills to real-life situations still needs to be explored. Our study aims to investigate the impact of haptic feedback on basic microsurgery skill acquisition, transfer, and retention, as well as on the user experience during VR training. An immersive simulator was developed to practice a microgrid task under magnification with and without haptic feedback. A similar physical setup with a binocular microscope was also designed to measure skills transfer to the real world. Thirty-three volunteers ($N=33$) were randomly divided into three participant groups: the haptic feedback group (HG), the no-haptic feedback group (NG), and the control group (CG). All participants performed the task on the physical setup during the pre-post-retention tests. After the pre-test, the first two groups performed six training trials on the immersive simulator, with the HG group receiving haptic feedback while performing the task. The control group did not receive any training. The results show that the HG and NG groups significantly improved their learning curve during training, with no significant differences between them. On the Other hand, the haptic feedback led to significantly higher usability and possibility of examination scores than those without haptic feedback. Finally, all the groups improved their time performance on the physical simulator. In addition, the haptic group participants showed a more significant gain in performance in terms of accuracy and error rates. These findings confirm the effectiveness of immersive environments combined with haptic feedback as a valuable training tool, facilitating the transfer of technical skills to realworld applications. Moreover, the results indicate that haptic feedback can also improve the user experience in immersive surgical simulators.

This study investigates the impact of two immersive debriefing strategies on learning outcomes in a virtual reality (VR) simulation focused on mobile cybersecurity. The simulation highlights everyday mistakes to raise awareness of risky behaviors in public settings. We developed and evaluated an immersive debriefing system that enables participants to review their performance and re-engage with the scenario through a redo phase. This redo was implemented in two formats: a full scenario redo (F-REDO) and a segmented redo targeting specific moments (S-REDO). We found that both redo formats were equally effective in learning outcomes and user satisfaction, using a mixed-methods approach combining standardized questionnaires (motivation, cognitive load, usability, knowledge retention) and qualitative trainer feedback. However, S-REDO demonstrated greater time efficiency without increasing cognitive load and was perceived by the trainer as more engaging and pedagogically relevant. These results support the integration of personalized, interactive debriefing tools in VR learning environments, particularly in domains requiring targeted remediation and critical decision-making. Abstract Abstract

Human vision guides lane keeping and hazard anticipation during driving. However, isolating how visual field constraints affect steering is difficult in real driving. This study used immersive VR with a depth-aligned aperture to restrict vision while participants drove curved roads under several conditions. Results revealed that misaligned restrictions impaired steering, while tangent point alignment partly improved performance. Results highlight how VR can probe visual–motor mechanisms in driving.

Typing with a keyboard is a common task in content production in the workplace. For simulation purposes in VR environments, it is important for users to perform this task accurately, with minimal performance loss, and without distraction. One common approach is using mid-air typing on virtual keyboards. However, this method presents challenges, particularly due to the lack of haptic feedback and spatial awareness. Various solutions have been suggested in the literature to address these challenges, but several design factors that influence performance, behavior, and user experience still need to be explored. This paper investigates the effects of two types of visual feedback (hover and keypress) and three passive haptic feedback conditions (physical keyboard, physical surface, and a mid-air virtual keyboard with no haptic feedback) and the possible interactions between these factors on typing using the two index fingers in VR. Results show that keypress visual feedback enhanced typing speed and reduced workload, while hover feedback lowered error rates but negatively impacted typing speed. Additionally, using a physical keyboard to provide passive haptic feedback increased the error rate. This increase in the error rate could be attributed to inaccuracies in finger and keyboard tracking, which may have caused a misalignment between the physical and virtual environments. Regarding eye gaze behavior, participants spent more time looking at the keyboard with the keypress visual feedback and when no haptic feedback was provided. Finally, participants rated the physical keyboard as the least usable option.

In the early stages of learning a technical skill, trainees require guidance from a mentor through augmented feedback to develop higher expertise. However, the impact of such feedback and the different modalities used to communicate it remain underexplored in immersive virtual environments (IVE). This paper presents a study in which 27 participants were divided into three groups to learn a tool manipulation trajectory in an IVE. Two experimental groups received guidance from an expert using visual and/or haptic augmented feedback, while the control group received no feedback. The results indicate that both experimental groups showed significantly greater improvement in tool trajectory performance than the control group from pre- to post-test, with no significant differences between them. Analysis of their learning curves revealed similar performance improvements in tool trajectory across trials, outperforming the control group. Additionally, the visual-haptic feedback condition was linked to lower task load in three out of six dimensions of the NASA-TLX and a higher perceived interdependence with the expert's actions. These findings suggest that augmented feedback from an expert enhances the learning of tool manipulation skills. Although adding haptic feedback did not lead to better learning outcomes compared to visual feedback alone, it did enhance the overall user experience. These results offer valuable insights for designing IVEs that support mentor-trainee interactions through augmented feedback.

With the mentoring model, a mentee can learn technical skills under the supervision of more experienced peers who demonstrate their knowledge through several communication modalities. Supporting the mentoring model within shared immersive training simulators holds promise in enhancing mentor-mentee interactions and learning outcomes in a safe environment. However, efficient communication within these spaces remains an open issue. This work presents a user study that explores the combination of communication modalities (verbal-visual, verbal-haptic, visual-haptic, and verbal-visual-haptic) to convey instructions to learners on the amplitude of movements to perform during a tool-handling task in an immersive environment. The study aims to examine the impact of the four modality combinations on performance (speed and accuracy of movement replication), mental workload, and participants’ user experience. The results show that participants achieved higher accuracy with the visual-haptic and verbal-visual-haptic conditions. Moreover, they performed the movements faster, and their movement trajectories were closer to the reference trajectories in the visual-haptic condition. Finally, the most preferred verbal-visual-haptic combination enhanced the users’ sense of presence, co-presence, social presence, and learning experience. No impact on the mental workload was observed. These results suggest that combining haptic and visual modalities is the best suited for enhancing learners’ performance. Adding the verbal modality can also improve the user experience in the immersive learning environment. These findings contribute to improving the design of immersive collaborative systems and pave the way for exploring novel avenues of research into the efficacy of multimodal communication for enhancing the mentoring-based acquisition of technical skills in VR. These tools hold promise for diverse applications, including medical simulation.

This paper proposes a simple, model-independent method to estimate the sideslip angle of Powered Two-Wheeled Vehicles (P2WV) using knowledge about the road model and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). This proposed model is then tested using simulator software (BikeSim) on different scenarios with different tracks, velocities, and sample rates. Our results indicate the validation of the model. With these promising results, we propose some future applications where this work can be utilized.

Mastering motor skills requires performing the task unconsciously with great speed and accuracy. This is acquired slowly through practice over time. Nonetheless, in domains such as surgery, the training of these skills in the field introduces safety, ethical and economic issues. In this context, immersive VR technologies offer the possibility to recreate real-world situations and allow the trainees to improve their skills in a safe and controlled environment. However, the design of such systems raises new research questions, such as how to represent the user in the virtual environment, and whether this representation can influence motor skills automaticity. In this work, we focus on how the user's hand representation can impact the training of tool-based motor skills in immersive VR. To investigate this question, we have created a VR simulator for training a tool-based pick and place task, and conducted a user study to evaluate how the user's hand visualization can influence participants' learning performance after a two-week training period. For that purpose, two groups of participants were trained in the VR simulator under one of the two experimental conditions: the presence and the absence of their virtual hands' representation, while a control group received no training. The results of the study show that training on the VR simulator improves the participants' motor task performance when compared with the control group. On the other hand, no difference was observed between the two training groups. This suggests that the user's hand visualization does not always impact tool-based motor tasks training in immersive VR simulators. Indeed, for short-term motor training there was no difference in performance between having a partial embodiment of the user's hands and only the tools representation.

Immersive VR technologies offer versatile training tools by recreating real-world situations in a virtual and safe environment and allowing users to have a first-person experience. The design of such training systems requires defining the most critical components to simulate, and to what extent they can be simulated successfully. One open research question for designing such systems is how to represent the user in the virtual environment, and which is the added value of this representation for training purposes. In this work, we focus on how the user's hand representation in an immersive virtual environment can impact the training of tool-based motor skills.To investigate this question, we have designed a VR trainer for a simple tool-based pick and place task. A user experiment was conducted to evaluate how the movements of the users' real hand representation influence their performance and subjective experience in the virtual environment. For that purpose, the participants performed the task on the VR simulator with two conditions: the presence or absence of their animated virtual hands representation. The results of this study show that, although users prefer to have a visual representation of their hands, they achieved similar and correlated performance in the VR system regardless of the hand representation condition. These results suggest that the presence of the user's hand representation is not necessary when performing a tool-based motor skill task in a VR trainer. These findings have practical implications for the design of VR simulators for training motor skills tasks since adding users' hand representation may require cumbersome and expensive additional devices.

Producing sensations of motion in driving simulators often requires using cumbersome and expensive motion platforms. In this article we present a novel and alternative approach for producing self-motion sensations in driving simulations by relying on haptic-feedback. The method consists in applying a force-feedback proportional to the acceleration of the virtual vehicle directly to the hands of the driver, by means of a haptic device attached to the manipulated controller (or a steering wheel). We designed a proof-of-concept based on a standard gamepad physically attached at the extremity of a standard 3DOF haptic display. Haptic effects were designed to match notably the acceleration/braking (longitudinal forces) and left/right turns (lateral forces) of the virtual vehicle. A preliminary study conducted with 23 participants, engaged in gamepad-based active VR navigations in a straight line, showed that haptic motion effects globally improved the involvement and realism of motion sensation for participants with prior experience with haptic devices. Taken together, our results suggest that our approach could be further tested and used in driving simulators in entertainment and/or professional contexts.

Virtual Reality simulators are increasingly used for training novice surgeons. However, there is currently a lack of guidelines for achieving interaction fidelity for these systems. In this paper, we present the design of two navigation techniques for a needle insertion trainer. The two techniques were analyzed using a state-of-the-art fidelity framework to determine their levels of interaction fidelity. A user study comparing both techniques suggests that the higher fidelity technique is more suited as a navigation technique for the needle insertion virtual trainer.

Inserting a needle to perform a biopsy requires a high haptic sensitivity. The traditional learning methods based on observation and training on real patients are questionable. In this paper, we present a preliminary evaluation of a VR trainer for needle insertion tasks. The system aims to replicate an existing physical setup while overcoming some of its limitations. Results permit to validate some design choices and suggest some UI improvements.

Interaction with computers using freehand gestures becomes more and more popular. However, it is hard to make precise inputs by making gestures in air without a physical support. In this paper, we present HorizontalDragger, a new selection technique aimed to improve the selection precision by converting the 2D selection problem into a 1D selection problem. After setting a region of interest in the display, all the objects inside the region are considered as potential targets. The user can drag the index finger horizontally to choose the desired target.

To make constrained manipulation of 3D objects in desktop 3D applications, 3D transformation widgets are commonly used. However, their performance degrades on touchscreens because of low accuracy of touch inputs and the fingertip occlusion problem. In this paper, we present TouchSketch, a touch-based interface which allows users to perform independently fine-grained object translation, rotation and scaling on mobile devices. Our manipulation technique permits using the non-dominant hand to specify the manipulation reference while the dominant hand is used to determine the operation mode and control the transformation. In addition to 3D manipulation, TouchSketch provides also a set of functions to edit the shape of 3D objects. Users can use this application to accomplish rapid sketching tasks. We have conducted a user study to evaluate the efficiency of our manipulation technique. The results show that our technique outperforms a Widget-based technique regarding both the efficiency and fluency.

Learning the practices and the performance of physically manipulating instruments in minimally invasive surgeries is an impetus for the development of surgical training simulators. However, an often-overlooked aspect of surgical training is learning how to see the body through the various imaging mechanisms. With this study, we address the ways in which surgeons demonstrate and instruct residents in seeing the body during minimally invasive surgical procedures. Drawing on observations and analysis of video recordings of minimally invasive surgical operations, we examine how particular anatomy and movement within the body to see and conceptualize that anatomy are made visible by the instructive practices of the surgeon. We use these findings to discuss further directions for minimally invasive surgical training through mechanisms for making the body visible during situated surgical training and surgical training simulation systems.

In this paper, we present three freehand interaction techniques for 3D content manipulation, the FingerShake, for object translation, the FingerRotate, for object rotation and the FingerSwing for object scale. These three techniques refer to a more generic concept which we call FingerOscillation. The main contribution is to interact with the machine by using finger oscillation movements. We introduce the design and the implementation of these techniques.

This paper examined the relative effectiveness of three communication modalities in a collaborative virtual environment. Communication modalities of verbal only (V), haptic only (H), and both (HV), were used in a 2D pointing task. A total of 36 participants were paired into 18 dyads. In each dyad, there was a supervisor and an acting agent. The supervisor used one of the three modalities to guide the acting agent to reach the target location. The time to task completion and the trajectory were recorded and analyzed. The results indicate that subjects using verbal only and haptic+verbal communication performed equally well in the collaborative pointing task. Subjects using haptic only communication spent more time and had longer path lengths than verbal only and haptic+verbal communication. Nevertheless, all three modalities were effective in communicating in a virtual collaborative task.

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