Virtual reality simulation modeling for tele-surgery and tele-haptic class of applications

Abstract

The incorporation of Haptic interfaces in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) suffers from setbacks due to an inherent technical problem that occurs when the users are geographically distributed. The main causes of such discrepancies are network delay, a lack of view of individual participants' activities, and haptic feedback . Although some strategies exist for dealing with these concerns, they do not adequately address reality, causality, or the sense of co-presence in CVEs during closely coupled haptic tasks. In this thesis, an approach based on both decorators and prediction to compensate for network delays and lost updates is proposed. This approach can be used together with existing networking-level techniques and can improve the quality of collaboration as perceived by remote users. This work makes use of the SCTP protocol, which sends critical update messages reliably and normal update messages with best-effort. A history buffer and a decorator-based predictor are added to the receiving side.