Experiments for a Collaborative Haptic Virtual Reality

In this paper, we present preliminary results of our ongoing networked virtual reality project by discussing the implementation and performance of a networked haptic 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 and jitter, the provision of timely transmission is critical. We carry out experiments to compare the performance of the haptic data transmission when using UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), and observe that neither UDP nor TCP is able to satisfy QoS (Quality of Service) requirements of the haptic transmission. As a further study, we plan to investigate some alternative haptic data transmission schemes.