Evaluation of Haptic Interaction in Intercultural Online Negotiation

In this study, we bring haptic technology into an online negotiation system to improve the method of conveying nonverbal information. Our goal is to verify the effectiveness of haptic interaction in communication between Japanese and Chinese participants. We conducted online negotiation experiments with and without haptic interaction. We classified Chinese participants according to their Japanese levels, and analyzed characteristics of their haptic interaction. Results of the questionnaire we administered implied that in negotiations with haptic interaction, the expression of emotion and the sense of presence were improved compared to those without haptic interaction. Results of Japanese – Chinese pairs showed haptic interaction to be of higher importance to Chinese than the Japanese pairs. For participants who lacked linguistic ability, haptic interaction still showed usefulness in experiments. We concluded from these results that haptic interaction during intercultural online negotiation was effective for intercultural users.