Transatlantic touch: a study of haptic collaboration over long distance

  • Authors:

  • Jung Kim;Hyun Kim;Boon K. Tay;Manivannan Muniyandi;Mandayam A. Srinivasan;Joel Jordan;Jesper Mortensen;Manuel Oliveira;Mel Slater

  • Affiliations:

  • The Touch Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering and The Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;The Touch Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering and The Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;The Touch Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering and The Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;The Touch Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering and The Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;The Touch Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering and The Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;Department of Computer Science, University College London, London;Department of Computer Science, University College London, London;Department of Computer Science, University College London, London;Department of Computer Science, University College London, London

  • Venue:
  • Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments - Special issue: Advances in collaborative virtual environments
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The extent to which the addition of haptic communication between human users in a stared 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 expenmental 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 coilborative 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 ants copresence experienced This extends earlier work by the authors to consider the possibility of haptic collaboration under real network conditions with a Number of improvements. Using the technology described in-this paper, transatlantic touch was successfully demonstrated between the Touch lab at Massachusetts Instatute of Technology, USA and Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics (VECG) lab at University Collegc London (UCL), UK in 2000, It as also presented at the Internet II demonstration meeting in 2002 between University of Southern California and the Massachusetts Instrtute of Technology.