Study of communication modalities for teaching distance information

We present an exploratory study to compare the haptic, visual, and verbal modalities for communicating distance information in a shared virtual environment. The results show that the visual modality decreased the distance estimation error while the haptic modality decreased the completion time. The verbal modality increased the sense of copresence but was the least preferred modality. These results suggest that a combination of modalities could improve communication of distance information to a partner. These findings can contribute to improving the design of collaborative VR systems and open new research perspectives on studying the effectiveness of multimodal interaction.