Collaborative haptic environment assessment

Collaborative virtual environments (CVE) allow users from different geographical locations to execute a shared task by acting upon the same entities in the virtual world. Most of these environments rely on visual and auditory senses. The advances in haptic technology have opened a path for the sense of touch to be integrated into CVE. The main issue in a haptic CVE is maintaining state consistency despite the existence of network delays. We focus this research on studying the effects of network latency on task performance and we report our preliminary results.