Transatlantic Touch: A Study of Haptic Collaboration over Long Distance

Abstract

The extent to which the addition of haptic communication between human users in a shared virtual environment (SVE) contributes to the shared experience of the users has not received much attention in the literature. In this paper we describe a demonstration of and an experimental study on haptic interaction between two users over a network of significant physical distance and a number of network hops. A number of techniques to mitigate instability of the haptic interactions induced by network latency are presented. An experiment to evaluate the use of haptics in a collaborative situation mediated by a networked virtual environment is examined. The experimental subjects were to cooperate in lifting a virtual box together under one of four conditions in a between-groups design. Questionnaires were used to report the ease with which they could perform the task and the subjective levels of presence and copresence experienced. This extends earlier work by the authors to consider the possibility of haptic collaboration under real network conditions with a

The Effect of Haptic Feedback on Basic Social Interaction within Shared Virtual Environments

“…Once the interaction is genuinely across the internet there are other significant problems caused by latency and network delays and outages. Some of these issues were considered in [4]. The experiment desribed here though shows that it is worth the effort to haptically enable such interactions, if the intention is to provide a sense of togetherness between people.…”

“…Furthermore recent work has been carried out on the effect of haptic feedback while performing collaborative tasks within SVEs, showing that haptic feedback significantly enhances task performance when compared to performing the same task without haptic feedback [2]- [4]. In the above cases the haptic feedback was related to the performed task.…”

Extension of colgate's passivity condition for variable-rate haptics

“…However, its usefulness (and its theoretical justification) starts being broken down, when the communication between the device and the virtual world is not perfect. One example for this is haptic interaction over the Internet [15], [16], [17], where the device and the virtual world are connected over the Internet with varyingdelay and packet-loss (e.g. molecular simulation in a remote super-computer over the Internet).…”

Telerehabilitation robotics: Bright lights, big future?

“…Alternatively, researchers at the MIT Touch Lab and University College London used peer-to-peer architecture to perform a "transatlantic" touch experiment in which a virtual box was lifted using PHANTOM ™ haptic devices [14]. User datagram protocol (UDP) transmission enabled fast exchange of information between clients across the Atlantic.…”