On supporting collaborative haptic interactions with physically-based 3D deformations

Haptic-enabled collaborative systems have long been limited to 3D rigid models only, primarily due to slow force calculations, long-time deformable simulations and large communication loads. In this paper, we propose a novel system to support real-time sharing of haptic feedbacks and deformable simulations of physically-based 3D models in a distributed virtual environment. Particularly, adopting a spectral method, we can effectively complete force calculation and deformable simulation based on user manipulations so as to achieve real-time streaming with low network loads. In addition, we explain how our system works under two different collaborative network architectures, and analyze them separately. The experimental results confirm the validity of our approach and prove its effectiveness. Our research has a wide range of applications in such fields as education (e.g., distributed, virtual class rooms) and entertainment (e.g., gaming).