Effect of Tactile Affordance During the Design of Extended Reality-Based Training Environments for Healthcare Contexts

In this paper, the effect of tactile affordance during the design of Extended Reality (XR) based environments is presented. Tactile affordance is one of the Human eXtended Reality Interaction (HXRI) criteria which help lay the foundation for human-centric XR-based training environments. XR-based training environments developed for two surgical procedures have been used to study the role of tactile affordance. The first XR environment is developed for the Condylar plating surgical procedure which is performed to treat the fractures of the femur bone and the second XR environment is developed to train users in endotracheal intubation. Three studies have been conducted to understand the influence of different interaction methods to elevate tactile affordance in XR-based environments. The studies and the results of the studies have been exhaustively discussed in this paper.