Tracking target motion under combined visual and kinesthetic disturbances

This study addresses a major problem in the design of HCI (human-computer interface) systems: how to avoid or reduce the long learning/adaptation process and the corresponding attentional load of the underlying hand-eye coordination task that frequently affects HCI systems. In particular, we considered a tracking task to a visual target whose frame of reference is rotated with respect to a body-fixed frame in a time-varying manner. We investigated it by means of a wrist robot coupled with a virtual reality system: kinesthetic and visual disturbances were applied during a tracking task, in a unimodal and bimodal manner, and we observed the performance. Tracking involved two degrees of freedom and the kinesthetic disturbance was applied by the robot through the third degree of freedom. Visual disturbance was provided by rotating the visual feedback. The results suggest that the combination of a suitable proprioceptive feedback with the kinematic redundancy of the HCI system might be a rather general principle for improving the efficiency of HCI systems.