A Haptic Interface for Linked Immersive and Desktop Displays: Maintaining Sufficient Frame Rate for Haptic Rendering

We perceive the real world through many senses. Most Virtual Reality (VR) display systems, however, only present the illusion to our visual and sometimes audio senses. Walk-in display systems, such as a CAVE, allow users to see their own bodies as they interact with virtual objects. Collaborative virtual environments CVE allow many users to share the same virtual experience including the manipulation of common objects. Haptic display systems allow a user to feel virtual objects. This project combines these three technologies to provide a natural interface for the shared manipulation of objects. Maintaining a sufficient frame rate, regardless of graphical complexity, is essential for feeling the texture of objects. We demonstrate that decoupling graphical and haptic rendering on to separate machines can maintain suitable frame rate, latency and jitter characteristics for visual and haptic senses, while maintaining sufficient consistency between them. We observed a relationship between the frame rate of visual representation affects the usability of the haptic interface.