Distributed stiffness

Summary form only given. Interactive simulation through distributed virtual environments has been at the very cutting edge of research in the last few years, not least through the developments in the hardware required (e.g., internet connection speed, desktop processing) and critically, the algorithms applied to overcoming the single significant problem in the field-communication delay. For this talk we will present the underlying reasons why, for distributed simulation, "what you see is not what I see" and "what you can touch is not what I can touch", and why, in theory, this will never be so. In practice, however, we are blessed with application specific heuristics than can come to our aid. We will outline a generic mechanism which may allow us a partial solution to overcome the problems associated with distributed haptic systems. The key to this issue is how a distributed simulation of an object, with all of its attributes, can be haptically displayed over a distributed environment? Central to this issue is the main physical attribute of an object in a haptic sense, and that is of object compliance, or stiffness. When is a stiff object stiff and when must it be otherwise? I would rather scientists found the answer to this question rather than the pornographers!.