Effects of network delay on a collaborative motor task with telehaptic and televisual feedback

The incorporation of haptic interfaces into collaborative virtual environments is challenging when the users are geographically distributed. Reduction of latency is essential for maintaining realism, causality and the sense of co-presence in collaborative virtual environments during closely-coupled haptic tasks. In this study we consider the effects of varying amounts of simulated constant delay on the performance of a simple collaborative haptic task. The task was performed with haptic feedback alone or with visual feedback alone. Subjects were required to make a coordinated movement of their haptic displays as rapidly as possible, while maintaining a target simulated spring force between their end effector and that of their collaborator. Increasing simulated delay resulted in a decrease in performance, either in deviation from target spring force and in increased time to complete the task. At large latencies, there was evidence of dissociation between the states of the system that was observed by each of the collaborating users. This confirms earlier anecdotal evidence that users can be essentially seeing qualitatively different simulations with typical long distance network delays.

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