Development and Evaluation of a Hybrid Shared Tele-Haptic System

A constitution method of a distributed virtual environment using haptic devices is shown. In recent years, the force-feedback devices have been developed and they have gotten a lot of attentions to realize a new interaction modality between human begins and computer systems. The haptic channels, however, are more sensitive to the network QoS (quality of service) such as delays and packet losses than the visual and acoustic channels. Therefore, we propose a new constitution method for realizing an effective virtual environment even in the low-quality network. The proposed method adopts a hybrid approach using the client-server and peer-to-peer models. In this paper, we describe our proposed method, an implemented system, and the results of a preliminary experiment to evaluate the scalability of the proposed architecture.