A prediction algorithm for haptic collaboration

The incorporation of haptic interfaces into collaborative virtual environments suffers from setbacks due to some inherent technical problem when the users are geographically distributed. The main causes of such discrepancies are network delay, lack of view of individual participants´ activities (awareness), and haptic feedback. Although some strategies exist for dealing with those concerns, they don´t adequately address realism, causality, and the sense of co-presence in collaborative virtual environments during closely-coupled haptic tasks. In this paper, we propose an approach based on prediction to compensate the limitations and to visualize the whole scenario for the users in order to help them cope with existing drawbacks intuitively. We introduce a predictor which can determine lost-update messages to improvise the current state, guess the current network delay, and anticipate remote user´s interaction strategy and virtual object´s position/orientation based on the history.