Cost-effective haptic-based networked virtual environments with high-resolution tiled display

In this paper, a haptic-based NVE (networked virtual environment) supporting high-resolution tiled display is proposed with a resource management scheme for future home applications such as a haptic-based networked game. Although NVEs with haptic interaction and immersive display have been developed in previous studies, they usually require expensive system configurations. In order to implement a cost-effective system, our proposed design includes a tiled display supporting high-resolution with several low-cost LCDs. The display nodes of the tiled display also have low processing and storage resource requirements because they only need to handle display-ready pixels received from the application node. The proposed resource management scheme, called as an object-based display scheme, reduces the resource requirements of the application node that would otherwise require significant resources to manage all the display nodes and to provide a user with haptic feedback. The proposed scheme segments graphic scenes into several pixelated virtual objects and assigns different frame rates to each object according to the interest of user. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme reduces the required network bandwidth and appropriately assigns the limited processing resources to graphic and haptic renderings for a high-level visual and haptic quality.