Haptic display in the virtual collaborative workspace shared by multiple users

This paper describes a method of haptic display in the virtual world shared by multiple remote users connected via network. Up to now, most investigations of haptic display are devoted to those related to single user or if multiple users exist even share the resources including computers which has no difference from the case of single user. In this paper, we are interested in the display of force feel in collaborative virtual workspace where multiple users participate via communication network. Excluding the possibility of large time delay among the users, the way of configuring individual haptic display systems is presented including the computation of interaction forces, joint driving forces of haptic devices and simulation of the virtual objects. A haptic display system is developed consisting of two haptic display devices operated by two remote users, and experimental results showing the validity of the proposed method are also presented.