Data transmission for haptic collaboration in virtual environments

Abstract

In this paper, we mainly present the analysis on the haptic data transmission over real network conditions in a networked haptic collaboration environment. Since haptic data are produced at the rate of 1khz, the transmission of haptic data is extremely sensitive to packet loss, and time variation. We took some experiments for transferring haptic data under various network conditions such as packet loss, time delay and jitter. The experiments lead us to find that the unstable network conditions can cause the problems of inconsistent view and irregular force feedback in networked haptic applications. In order to overcome those problems, we tried to use a simple linear prediction algorithm for the haptic data transmission and the simple prediction algorithm shows better performance. In conclusion, a simple prediction algorithm can be a reasonable solution for the haptic data compensation in networked haptic applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.