Comfortable manipulation of a virtual gearshift prototype with haptic feedback

Improving quality, design and comfort is very important for hightechnology companies in order to stay competitive against the other enterprises. A present problem is that the new physical dedicated prototypes they need to create for the tests are very expensive and time-consuming [5]. Another solution would be to create virtual and touchable prototypes. We would work with the Haptic WorkstationTM provided by Immersion Corporation (http://www.immersion.com/3d/docs/HWS2 datasheet.pdf ) for the simulations. The user would be in a fully immersive, virtual and flexible environment with haptic feedback on his/her arms and fingers. We have developed with the help of RENAULT TRUCKS Cockpit Studies Department a completely virtual cockpit with a touchable gearbox prototype. At the beginning we only wanted to test the feasibility of such an application but in a second time we also made some biometric tests with the help of an ElectroMyoGraph (EMG) to verify the user comfort and his belief in the simulation.