A Haptic-enabled, Distributed and Networked Immersive System for Multi-User Collaborative Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining attention in various domains such as entertainment, industry, mental healthcare and VR training. Al- though most of these use-cases are still limited to single-user tasks, a lot of applications are heavily depending on multi-user collaboration. Existing multi-user VR systems are most often created in a classic server-client architecture, however, which induces unpredictable network behaviour which can affect the end-user's Quality-of-Experience (QoE) and performance. In addition, the interaction methods in these systems are often constrained to either traditional VR controllers or very use-case specific interaction methods, such that general purpose haptic gloves form a somewhat under-explored part of literature. Therefore, we (i) present a networked, distributed multi-user VR system with synchronization of environments over a low-bandwidth networked connection. In addition, we (ii) enhance the experience by adding haptic gloves to the system, which we compare to the traditional VR controllers in a subjective experiment. As a proof-of-concept, a use case is implemented in which two users have to prepare and bake a virtual pizza. The results show that high framerates (> 90 Frames Per Second (FPS)) can be obtained while keeping network throughput to a minimum ( < 1 Mbps). The accompanying user study shows that haptic gloves are preferred when immersiveness is the main emphasis of the virtual environment, while controllers are more suited when performance is in the center of attention. In objective terms, the applicability of haptic feedback is highly dependent on the task at hand.