Evaluation of remote collaborative manipulation for scientific data analysis
Cédric Fleury, Thierry Duval, Valérie Gouranton, Anthony J. Steed · 2012
In the context of scientific data analysis, we propose to compare a remote collaborative manipulation technique with a single user manipulation technique. The manipulation task consists in positioning a clipping plane in order to perform cross-sections of scientific data that show several points of interest located inside these data. For the remote collaborative manipulation, we have chosen to use the 3-hand manipulation technique proposed by Aguerreche et al., which is very suitable with a remote manipulation of a plane. We ran two experiments to compare the two manipulation techniques with some participants located in two different countries. These experiments has shown that the remote collaborative manipulation technique was significantly more efficient than the single user manipulation when the 3 points of interest were far apart inside the scientific data and, consequently, when the manipulation task was more difficult and required more precision. When the 3 points of interest were close together, there was not significant difference between the two manipulation techniques.