A feasibility study on the use of a remote supercomputer in a collaborative virtual environment with force feedback

Virtual reality technology brings numerous advantages to many different application fields and the continuous increase in computational power and network speed means that it is possible to find new methods to improve training and reduce education costs. It is becoming feasible to realize multi-user systems via networks and interactive applications with world wide accessibility features and collaborative working without being limited in terms of location. One of the essential requirements of a realistic surgical simulator is to reproduce haptic sensations due to the interactions in the virtual environment. However, the interaction needs to be performed in real-time, since a delay between the user action and the system reaction reduces user experience. But accuracy and efficiency are two opposite requirements; in fact, increased accuracy implies higher computational time and vice versa. So, it is necessary to find a trade-off according to the application and to reduce realism in favour of the real-time interaction. In this paper a feasibility study on the use of the computational power of a remote supercomputer in a virtual reality application with force feedback is presented; the aim is verify whether real-time haptic interactions can be made in addition to a very realistic virtual environment shared among different users involved in a collaborative virtual environment application.