An Experimental Study on the Performance of Haptic Data Transmission in Networked Haptic Collaboration

In this paper, we present preliminary results of our ongoing networked virtual reality project by discussing the implementation and performance of an experimental haptic collaboration system; a networked haptic basketball game. In this game, online players feel like handling a real basketball since they are able to feel the sense of touch by using haptic interfaces. One of challenging issues in this implementation is haptic data transmission over the Internet to allow online multi-user play. Since haptic information is extremely sensitive to delay, jitter, and loss, the provision of timely transmission is critical. We carry out some experiments to compare the performance of the haptic data transmission under various delays, jitters, and losses of packets for two models; one is the position transfer model and the other is the force transfer model. We observe that loss of packets may reduce the force feedback in the Position Transfer Model and jitters are more sensitive than delays for both models.