Tangible tabletops and dual reality for crisis management: case study with mobile robots and dynamic tangible objects

In this paper, we present an experimental study between tangible interaction and tactile interaction on tabletops in a dual reality environment. We recruited 32 participants to take part in a user study, which consists of remotely displacing robots and exploring a simulated disaster area using a tabletop and robot toys on its surface. We present our results and we focus on the differences between the two interaction techniques for remote control of robots. Our findings indicate that the tangible interaction outperforms the tactile interaction in usability and in terms of committed errors, classified by different criteria. Meanwhile they indicate also that for the user workload there is no significant difference between tangible and tactile interactions.