Interaction of visual and haptic information in simulated environments: texture perception

This paper describes experiments relating to the perception of the roughness of simulated surfaces via the haptic and visual senses. Subjects used a magnitude estimation technique to judge the roughness of “virtual gratings” presented via a PHANToM haptic interface device, and a standard visual display unit. It was shown that under haptic perception, subjects tended to perceive roughness as decreasing with increased grating period, though this relationship was not always statistically significant. Under visual exploration, the exact relationship between spatial period and perceived roughness was less well defined, though linear regressions provided a reliable approximation to individual subjects’ estimates.

A Real-time, Predictive Architecture for Distributed Virtual Reality

User interaction within a virtual environment may take various forms: a teleconferencing application will require users to speak to each other (Geak, 1993), with computer supported co-operative working; an Engineer may wish to pass an object to another user for examination; in a battle field simulation (McDonough, 1992), users might exchange fire. In all cases it is necessary for the actions of one user to be presented to the others sufficiently quickly to allow realistic interaction. In this paper we take a fresh look at the approach of virtual reality operating systems by tackling the underlying issues of creating real-time multi-user environments.