A Scheme for Haptic Data Transmission Under Various Network Conditions

Haptic Collaboration Virtual Environment (HCVE) is an enhanced virtual reality space that supports sense of touch, which is called "haptic". In HCVE, remote users connected over networks are able to collaborate by sharing touching experiences in addition to well-established audio and visual interfaces. The success of HCVE largely depends on timely transmission of haptic data despite time-varying network conditions such as delay, loss, and jitter. However, the fact that the data generation frequency of haptic interface devices is extremely high, e.g. 1 KHz, makes the realization of successful HCVE more challenging. For seamless haptic data communication even under adverse network conditions, we propose a linear prediction algorithm and a buffering scheme. The prediction algorithm, which is basically extrapolation, is to mitigate the negative effects of network delay, loss and jitter, and the buffering scheme is to help synchronization of haptic interaction between remote users. We build an experimental test bed for the evaluation of our proposed schemes, and as the results of analyzing quantitative measurement results, conclude that those are effective in improving the quality of haptic experiences.