Quantifying the effects of latency on sensory feedback in distributed virtual environments
Proceedings of Virtual Images Seminar 2006, page 9--16. (January 2006)College de France, Paris.Abstract
The effects of delaying visual feedback in a Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) are well documented. The effects of delaying haptic feedback, however, are less well understood. The few studies that address the issue indicate that latency in haptic feedback is detrimental to performance, sometimes to a greater extent than delaying visual feedback; however, someone has yet to produce a definitive model of performance in the face of latency in haptic feedback. As part of the Collaborative Haptics Project at the University of Manchester (http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/research/cohap/cohap.php), a series of experiments have attempted to address this issue, by introducing increasing levels of latency to perceptual tasks shown to benefit from haptic feedback. Contrary to expectation, latency in haptic feedback had little or no effect on task performance, indicating that its role in these tasks is far less important than that of vision. The implications of these results, and the difficulties of designing a paradigm for effectively quantifying the effects of haptic latency are discussed.