An area-of-interest based communication architecture for shared haptic virtual environments

Communication architectures conceived for Shared Haptic Virtual Environments (SHVEs) are based on either the client-server or the peer-to-peer paradigms. High-rate rendering and communication between collaborating users quickly leads to performance bottlenecks, if the virtual environment's size and complexity or the number of collaborating users increases. We propose a decentralized communication architecture for SHVEs, which exploits areas of interest (AoI) of a user to dynamically form smaller communication groups. High-rate information exchange following the client-server paradigm is used within these groups to support satisfactory haptic collaboration and consistency. A single group member is selected to simulate the object states and to relay this state to the other group members. Peer-to-peer inter-group communication is also used, based on spatial proximity, to further reduce the overall communication load. We implemented a prototype based on our proposed architecture and present some first evaluation results. They serve as a proof-of-concept and show the effectiveness of dynamic group maintenance in conjunction with additional traffic control schemes.