Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE) set out to create an environment for thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of users to simultaneously interact with each other as in the real world. Interestingly, and to some extent counter-intuitively due to inherent technical challenges, it is this massiveness that has made MMVEs more successful than traditional virtual environments which could only support about a dozen simultaneous users interacting in real time. For example, Massively Multiuser Online Games (MMOGs), now a very profitable sector of the industry and subject to academic and industry research, is a special case of MMVEs where hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously interact with each other. Although originally designed for gaming, MMOGs are now widely used for socializing, business, commerce, scientific experimentation, and many other practical purposes, and are among the few industries unaffected by the global economic downturn. One could say that MMOGs are the ""killer app"" that brings MMVEs into the realm of eSociety. In parallel, haptics, has emerged as a new media that will significantly change the way human-human and human-computer interaction is done. The potential of haptics technology is highly significant and can affect fields as diverse as modeling & animation, geophysical analysis, medical training, virtual museums, engineering design and planning, surgical simulations, tele-operation and control of scientific instruments, gaming, and robotic manipulation in hazardous environments. The impact of haptics becomes even more significant when networking is added to it, called tele-haptics, and used in human to human communication, collaboration, and tele-operation using the sense of touch. Beyond the obvious extension to remote collaboration, however, recasting haptics as an intrinsically networked technology allows reconsideration of the entire architectural model for CVEs and MMVEs. This research sets out to design and implement an architecture called MASSIVE GAIN that could be used as a platform for interaction among massive number of users, not just through conventional audio/visual media, but also through high fidelity haptic media.