Prediction-based decorators for distributed collaborative haptic virtual environments

摘要

Haptic Collaborative Virtual Environments, like other collaborative environments, are adversely affected by the inherent network lag, caused by delay, jitter, or packet loss, when users are geographically distributed. In this paper, we propose an approach based on both decorators and prediction to compensate for network delays and lost updates. Our approach adds to existing networking-level techniques a history buffer, and a decorator-based predictor at the receiving side and can improve the quality of collaboration as perceived by the remote users. The predictor 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, while the decorator will act as a visual cue to inform the user about current network conditions such as the amount of lag experienced; this allows the user to cope with the lag from a human-machine interface point of view.