How to Go Beyond the Frontiers of Haptic Interaction?

This paper discusses the issue of using haptic devices with limited workspaces in large immersive virtual environments. In other words, we try to answer to the following question: how to go beyond the physical limitations of the force-feedback device and reach distant virtual objects that are located outside the mechanical workspace of the device? We describe in this paper two interaction techniques that were both designed to cope with this issue: the Bubble technique for translation motions, and the Haptic Hybrid Rotations for rotation motions. These two interaction techniques use a hybrid position/rate control of the objects. The force-feedback of the device is used to simulate the use of an elastic device when in the rate-control mode. These two techniques were evaluated in several experiments that showed both their efficient usability and positive acceptance during assembly or painting tasks.