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Part 1: Long and Short Papers; International audience; Implementing appropriate interaction for Virtual Reality (VR) applications is one of the most challenging tasks that a developer has to face. This challenge is due to both technical and theoretical factors. First, from a technical point of view, the developer does not only have to deal with non-standard devices, he has to facilitate their use in a parallel a coordinated way, interweaving the fields of 3D and multimodal interaction. Secondly, from a theoretical point of view, he has to design the interaction almost from scratch, as a standard set of interaction techniques and interactive tasks has not been identified. All these factors are reflected in the absence of appropriate tools to implement VR interaction techniques. In this paper, some existing tools that aim at the development of VR interaction techniques are studied, analysing their strengths and, more specifically, their shortcomings, such as the difficulties to integrate them with any VR platform or their absence of a strong conceptual background. Following that, a framework to implement VR interaction techniques is described that provides the required support for multimodal interaction and, also, uses experience gained from the study of the former tools to avoid previous mistakes. Finally, the usage of the resulting framework is illustrated with the development of the interaction techniques of a sample application.

A force-feedback Phantom device, a custom-built vibrotactile dataglove, and embossed paper sheets are compared to detect different textures. Two types of patterns are used, one formed by different geometrical shapes, and the other with different grooves width. Evaluation shows that the vibrotactile dataglove performs better in the detection of textures where the frequency of tactile stimuli varies, and it is even useful to detect more complex textures.

This paper highlights some of the current problems in CVE development. These problems are mainly due to a lack of a good interaction model guiding the behaviour of the environments. This paper introduces the definition of a model based on the idea of the interaction views. The key concepts for understanding interaction views are also given during the explanation of the model. The paper also describes a reference architecture based on this model which can be found useful for the design of modelling tools, and a prototype application that helps understanding both the architecture and the model.

Many Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have been developed to date. However, when focusing our attention on the way users perform their task in these systems, there is still little research on understanding the impact of different platforms on the collaboration experience. This paper describes not only a CVE, in this case, one that reproduces a block building game; but also an experiment that was carried out to evaluate both the interaction using different input and output technologies and the impact of collaboration on task performance and overall experience.