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Collaborative haptic environments, multimodal interaction and communication, hand over task, experiment. Object manipulation is an important activity in everyday life that can also be performed in virtual environments. In the study presented here the extent to which haptic force feedback improves performance when a person hands over a virtual object to another is investigated. Joint manipulation of objects in collaborative virtual environments (CVE) has not been as well studied as single user manipulation. Recently it has also become possible to add haptic force feedback in virtual environments in order to support perception of form, weight, surface friction, texture and softness or hardness of virtual objects. A number of studies have shown that adding haptic force feedback improves single users performance when manipulating virtual objects. The added value of haptic force feedback lies in peoplesábility to feel the object they manipulate, which makes interaction faster and more precise. One study showed that the effect of haptic force feedback shortened task completion times when the task was to put a peg in a hole simulating assembly work [4]. Hasser et al. [5] showed that the addition of force feedback to a computer mouse improved targeting performance and decreased targeting errors. It has also been shown that if people get haptic force feedback from the context their performance is improved [11]. Results from that study showed that if a person gets haptic feedback from a table when sliding an object between two targets, performance is better than if moving the object through space without haptic feedback from the context. In many cases people need to manipulate virtual objects jointly and would benefit from haptic force feedback when doing so. A few studies have investigated issues regarding joint manipulation of virtual objects in a haptic collaborative virtual environment [2; 6; 8; 9; 10]. In one study subjects were asked to play a collaborative game in virtual environments with one of the experimenters who was an " expert " player. The players could feel objects in the common environment. They were asked to move a ring on a wire in collaboration with each other such that contact between the wire and the ring was minimised or avoided. Results from this study showed that haptic communication enhanced perceived togetherness and improved task performance when pairs of people worked together [2]. In another study it was shown that subjects performed tasks significantly faster and more precisely when …