Roger Hubbold, Manchester University: 15th December, 2004
Collaborative Haptics
Abstract:
Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) have been suggested as an effective
way for people to meet and discuss problems without the inconvenience of having
to travel. The vision is of shared 3D worlds in which different participants
can visualise and manipulate data, and cooperate to solve some task. With businesses
increasingly operating in a global context, and with some scientists pursuing
a Grid computing agenda, a successful CVE ought to find plenty of opportunities
for application. However, real networks introduce latency and jitter into the
interactions between distributed users, and these can impact adversely on the
usefulness of CVEs.
In this talk I will focus on the problems of interacting with models using haptic devices. These allow users to feel forces, such as collisions between objects, as well as to see visually the models they are interacting with. Haptic devices impose strict constraints on response times, which means that any software architecture that support haptics for distributed collaboration needs to be carefully designed. The most extreme use is what we have termed 'collaborative haptics', where remotely collaborating users attempt to manipulate the same object concurrently. The fundamental aim of our work is to understand the impact on task performance of real network lag and jitter, by profiling users through careful experiments. Based on these we are conducting trials where two users must collaborate to complete a task in the face of varying amounts of lag and jitter, and attempting to design strategies for minimising the effects of lag. I will describe our approach to this problem and the results we have achieved to date, some of which were unexpected.
Roger Hubbold is Professor of Virtual Environments in The School of Computer
Science at The University of Manchester, where he heads the Advanced Interfaces
Group. He holds a first class BSc in Engineering (1967) and a PhD in Computer
Graphics (1971). His research interests include collaborative virtual environments,
haptics, visualisation and virtual environment software architectures and algorithms,
computer vision techniques for unencumbered interaction, and construction of
virtual environments from images and video. He is currently PI on the EPSRC-funded
project 'Shared Haptic Manipulation in Distributed Virtual Environments', on
which this talk is based.