Comparison of grip action triggered by haptic or visual cue

Current state of the art in virtual environment development allows different levels of immersion, from graphical environments, where only visual information is presented to the user, to haptic environments, where whole set of visual and kinesthetic information is presented to the user. This paper presents results of two experimental sets conducted in a haptic virtual environment (HVE) and in a graphical virtual experiment (GVE) respectively. The grip force responses to an abrupt haptic or visual cue are investigated and compared. Although the underlying neural control mechanism triggered by haptic or visual cue are different, both responses are well pronounced, have similar shape and can thus be compared. Response triggered by the haptic cue has shorter delay, is stronger and shorter in duration in comparison to the response triggered by the visual cue.