Design and preliminary evaluation of an EGO-exocentric technique for cooperative manipulation

This work proposes and evaluates the EGO-EXO technique for cooperative manipulation in a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE). From the premise that simultaneous control over navigation and manipulation by the user can make interaction complex, this technique places two users in asymmetric viewpoint positions during the cooperative manipulation of an object, allowing one of them to follow the object. It applies the separation of degrees of freedom method between the two viewpoints to make the manipulation easier. The technique is evaluated through a user study to test its efficiency on handling cooperative manipulation. Results indicate that, for manipulation tasks that require high amplitude position control along precise orientation control, the technique performs with a lower collisions to time ratio.