Feel the difference

A new study in the field of haptic technology promises to bring the sense of touch to virtual worlds and make the internet more accessible to the visually impaired.

With the use of specially-designed devices, the researchers involved in the study visualise a future where online shoppers can feel the products they want to buy, or people playing interactive tennis feel the force of the ball hitting their racquet.

The researchers from Queen's University, Belfast, in collaboration with industry partners including Immersion Corporation, will spend the next three years working on the network architecture needed to support such a system.

Specifically, they will find a way to compensate for network delays that can affect the quality of haptic performance. If an internet connection was running slowly during a game of online tennis, a user might feel the force of the ball hitting the racquet seconds after impact.

Prof Alan Marshall, the principal investigator of the project, said voice delay over the internet can be about 50 milliseconds and haptics will cause an even greater delay. 'We know that when we put echo cancelling on voice it can reduce delay time, so what we need to do is to develop the equivalent of an echo canceller for haptics,' he said.