The Effect of Prediction on Collaborative Haptic Applications

Haptic Collaborative Virtual Environments suffer from setbacks due to network lag when the users are geographically distributed. In this paper we propose an approach based on prediction to compensate for this lag The predictor can improvise the current state of a shared object in the presence of packet loss, guess the current network delay, and anticipate remote user´s interaction strategy and virtual object´s position/orientation based on the history. We demonstrate that our prediction approach improves the quality of collaboration in the session, especially when combined with other methods such as networking-level solutions.