Challenges in the Deployment of Visuo-Haptic Virtual Environments on the Internet

Haptic sensory feedback has been shown to complement the visual and auditory senses, improve user performance and provide a greater sense of togetherness in collaborative and interactive virtual environments. However, we are faced with numerous challenges when deploying these systems over the present day Internet. The most significant of these challenges are the network performance limitations of the Wide Area Networks. In this paper, we offer a structured examination of the current challenges in the deployment of haptic-based distributed systems by analyzing the recent advances in the understanding of these challenges and the progress that has been made to overcome them.