Experimental Study of Haptic Interaction in Distributed Virtual Environments

Abstract

Abstract. This paper reports an on-going work in which technologies are being developed to support multisensory communication for distributed virtual environments. A series of experiments for investigating the requirements of distant haptic interaction on IP-based networks have been conducted by using the custom-built experimental platforms. Existing research has identified the challenges of using haptics in distributed virtual environments and proposed several approaches to overcome these problems. However, there is still a need to investigate the network issues systematically in order to determine the allowable latency, jitter and packet loss for haptic data communication. This is one of our research objectives. In this paper, we present the details of the experimental studies that have been conducted so far. 1