Interaction Sound Feedback in a Haptic Virtual Environment to Improve Motor Skill Acquisition

This paper describes the concept and the realisation of a research prototype of a haptic environment that is enhanced with sound feedback to impart implicit knowledge and to teach motor skills to trainees. The sound feedback is to be understood as an additional feedback that provides information to the trainee about his or her actions in relation to objects in a virtual haptic environment. Although the setup simulates the interaction with haptic objects, the additional auditory feedback goes beyond the imitation of real sound behaviour and enables new ways to convey information about user interaction, i.e., movements in space with or without forces applied to tangible objects. The goal of the interaction with additional auditory feedback is to enrich the virtual environment to a full multimodal interaction environment, to support precise movements and to optimise the motor skill learning curve of trainees. The prototype is focused on computer based learning in the context of surgical training and it uses a virtual document planner that provides the appropriate instructions and tailored feedback for the human computer interaction through reasoning on the basis of an explicit knowledge representation. Keyword: auditory feedback, human computer interaction, implicit interaction, motor skill training, virtual document planner.