The effect of incongruent delay on guided haptic training

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has great potential as a tool for training. Remote haptic virtual environments (VE) allow multiple users to interact in the same virtual space to accomplish tasks. Combining these ideas, it is possible to apply a remote VE to connect skilled trainers with remote trainees for training. In this paper we examined guided haptic training as an interaction method where one user guides another user through a VR simulation. We considered interaction with virtual soft objects, which were pressed and deformed. Within a remote VE for guided haptic training, network factors such as delay could influence how the guided user perceives object softness. In this paper, we examined how incongruent delays between the streams of visual and haptic information affect this perception. We found that when haptic information was delayed 133.33 ms beyond visual information there was a statistically significant difference in the perception of object softness. These preliminary observations can be used to locate a threshold for applying to future remote guided VE training tools.