Study on a Ubiquitous Mixed Reality Technology for Integrating First Person Haptic Media and Wireless Network

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We have studied on how to construct a realistic ubiquitous mixed reality (UMR) environment. The purpose of the research is to develop a new technological framework to effectively support new modalities such as haptic interface devices in addition to the traditional image and sound media. Basic technologies and software systems are designed and developed. This study has produced the following results :1. We devised and implemented some fundamental technologies such as a haptic rendering optimization method and a high performance network protocol for efficiently sharing haptic media. The haptic optimization method allows even novices to intuitively optimize haptic devices without paying attention to any device-specific characteristics. The newly developed protocol uses a method called dead reckoning to preserve efficient and stable haptic communications.2. We designed and developed some application systems by using the technologies implemented in item 1. The developed systems include a distributed virtual environment for supporting collaborative 3D operations and a remote instruction system for teaching handwritten characters.3. We further enhanced the application systems as described in item 2 to be usable on the network. The experimental test-bed was constructed by using some international, national and regional gigabit networks. Then, we deployed the application systems in several collaborators' sites in Japan and Korea and conducted experiments to verify the effectiveness of the developed methods and systems. We especially analyzed how network delays, jitters, and packet losses impact the usability and user-friendliness on haptic communications and how our developed methods compensate for the degradations. The whole system concepts, proposed methods, experimental system configurations, and experimental results and analyses are published in various conference papers and journal papers.