Cooperative Manipulation of a Virtual Object by Multiple Remote Users

In this paper, we explore the issues of force display in the cooperative virtual environment shared by multiple users distributed over the network with heterogeneous hardware platforms. The proposed method is to cope with the problem of small time delay and the difference of sampling rate in the distributed configuration. In the proposed approach the interaction forces of the participants are just treated as the independent sources of acceleration. Thus the action of a participant simply changes the acceleration of the virtual object and consequently the states of the virtual object will be updated. When the updated states are reported to all the participants, the information on the time of state changes is delivered, too. Employing the discrete state information updated by the other users, each user modifies his own virtual environment and pseudo-realtime simulation can be realized. Excluding the software interface and the communication technique, it is proposed the simulation method for the operation of respective users and the way of calculating the driving input to the display device. For experimental verification we construct a cooperative virtual environment shared by two remote users and outline the results of experiments.