Moderating Simulation Lag in Haptic Virtual Environments

Simulation lag is a known issue in networked virtual environments where users are geographically distributed. When users collaborate across the network using haptics, there are always momentary lacks of synchronization due to packet delay, loss, and jitter. Many strategies exist for dealing with such scenarios, but these strategies concentrate on one aspect and don’t adequately address the necessary realism, causality, and the sense of co-presence in the virtual environments during closely-coupled haptic tasks. In this paper we propose an approach that uses two techniques to moderate the simulation lag in haptic-based virtual environments. A decorator, which is a visual cue embedded in the haptic virtual object, is used to inform the user about the sate of simulation lag. In addition, this decorator is controlled by an algorithm that predicts the users’ most likely action in the very short term, and compensates delayed or lost packets by interpolating collaborative actions. In oth...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ANSS
• Authors: Azzedine Boukerche, Shervin Shirmohammadi, Abuhoss Hossain
• Keywords: ANSS 2006, Haptic Virtual Object, Simulation Lag, Virtual Environments