Effects of packet loss and latency on the temporal discrimination of visual-haptic events

Temporal discontinuities and delay caused by packet loss or communication latency often occur in multimodal telepresence systems. It is known that such artifacts can influence the feeling of presence [1]. However, it is largely unknown how the packet loss and communication latency affect the temporal perception of multisensory events. In this article, we simulated random packet dropouts and communication latency in the visual modality and investigated the effects on the temporal discrimination of visual-haptic collisions. Our results demonstrated that the synchronous perception of crossmodal events was very sensitive to the packet loss rate. The packet loss caused the impression of time delay and influenced the perception of the subsequent events. The perceived time of the visual event increased linearly, and the temporal discrimination deteriorated, with increasing packet loss rate. The perceived time was also influenced by the communication delay, which caused time to be slightly overestimated.